Assurity Consulting cloud platform finds a market hungry for innovation and transformation – Reseller News
Russell Ewart (Assurity Consulting)
Adoption of Assurity Cloud has outstripped expectations since launch in 2020, says Assurity Consulting’s general manager of testing and assurance.
Russell Ewart said Assurity Cloud was forged during New Zealand’s biggest and most successful transformation at Inland Revenue.
The AWS-based platform had achieved revenue targets for 2023 within the first two months of the new financial year. The platform had also matured to offer two distinct product offerings for clients, Ewart said.
First, Assurity Cloud supported enterprise innovation, allowing organisations to design, build and elicit fast feedback on prototypes from geographically dispersed customers or stakeholders while meeting government security standards.
Secondly, the platform supported enterprise testing, including continuous testing and performance testing delivered as a service, allowing organisations to focus on activities “above the value line”. This removed management, infrastructure and license costs associated with traditional testing approaches.
At launch in July, 2020, Assurity Consulting said the platform aimed to reduce the cost of technical transformations and accelerate the return from digital services for New Zealand organisations. The platform provided “a true outside in view” of the digital experience for customers, users and digital ecosystem partners, Assurity said.
Crowdsourcing for health and safety
Health and safety regulator WorkSafe is one customer to benefit, using the cloud platform to explore how crowdsourcing could be used as a way of improving work and worker participation.
Worksafe innovation manager Richmond Johnston said the agency was looking for a better way of connecting workers with management on the crucial topic of how they actually got things done.
“In the past, this was achieved with macro level, centralised and time-intensive tools to explore problems or challenges people might face in doing their work – things like workshops or clipboard surveys,” he said.
However, these tools limited participation ad could not validate differing conditions across organisations and contexts. They were also inaccessible and couldn’t provide transparent information flow.
“Workers don’t have the right tools to share and explore their problems and find innovative solutions that work for them,” Johnston said.
The innovation team came up with the idea for a crowdsourcing platform that equipped workers to log activities and ideas and connect them directly with management.
This platform was fully funded via the Digital Government Innovation Fund and the team went straight to sandboxing, quickly establishing viability and building a candidate app.
The outcome BetterWork NZ, which breaks down traditional barriers to sourcing ideas and information from workers across every level, business and industry, allowing instant entry of ideas, solutions, or unique approaches to problem solving on daily tasks.
In essence, WorkSafe wanted to develop a platform to go straight to the experts – the workers themselves. Once an idea has been posted to BetterWork NZ, comments and polls can be added, expanding and stretching those ideas in a way that is transparent and open.
Accessing front-line ingenuity
The value of the platform was in capturing the ingenuity of workers on the front line, equipping them with a tool to record and share methods, approaches and techniques which get the job done faster and more efficiently.
It also provided managers and leaders with more ideas to improve the way work is organised and designed.
Initial testing showed promise but moving the platform from experimental to production presented an unusual challenge: the prototype had to be deployed onto a platform approved for use by government entities, with higher security, privacy, and accessibility standards.
Assurity Consulting simply moved the app into its Assurity Cloud, which was already on the government-approved AWS cloud, taking BetterWork NZ from concept to beta and into to production where it is delivering valuable insights.
BetterWork NZ is now being used in forestry to improve the working environment. In Construction, Fulton Hogan, Downer and Fletchers are collaborating in search of solutions to common problems, beginning with physical and verbal abuse directed towards roadside workers.
In both examples, the businesses have made commitments to trial and/or prototype a selection of the most viable and desirable ideas. Johnston said more than 60 ideas have come through for consideration and analysis already.
Tackling ERP upgrade challenges
Assurity Cloud has also helped Christchurch-headquartered local fibre company Enable, which engaged Assurity Consulting to deliver of a suite of automated testing services to reducing upgrade overheads and improve software quality for its enterprise resource planning system.
Wholly owned by Christchurch City Holdings, the commercial arm of the Christchurch City Council, Enable was on a version of Microsoft Dynamics Business Central that was still called “NAV”, a hat-tip to Microsoft’s 2002 acquisition Navision.
This had been fully replaced by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2018 and Enable opted for a migration to the renamed and reimagined version in 2021.
After the migration, Enable resolved to keep its ERP software up-to-date, said Richard Swift, Enable’s finance systems manager.
“While it wasn’t as crucial in years gone by, these days it is important to install the latest upgrades and patches as soon as they are available, mainly from a cybersecurity and risk management standpoint,” he said.
However, by the time the rollout was completed, the software was already two updates behind.
That delivered a realisation: A lot of testing was necessary and Swift could see the testing would take up two weeks of finance team time every quarter, interfering with business as usual.
“It’s a big and costly overhead,” Swift said.
An engineer working on web client testing pointed out the availability of tools to address the issue, so the Enable team had the idea that repeatable tasks in ERP testing might benefit from something similar.
“We went to Assurity and they immediately knew what we were talking about and where we wanted to go,” Swift said.
A journey towards automation
The Assurity Cloud Platform was designed for precisely the purpose Swift and his team at had in mind, with on-demand tests customised to the requirements of customers. When upgrade cycles rolled around, those assets were called upon to run the necessary evaluations.
Swift said a proof of concept met all expectations.
“It was a click of a button and then watching it execute,” he said. “It just worked.”
To date, around 20 transactional, repeatable tests have been automated and reside in the Assurity Cloud, ready for Enable to call on as every upgrade cycle takes hold.
“We request and use those tests as required, while also calling on Assurity for test expertise to complement the skills of our team; we’re finance professionals, not test experts, and though we have a business and technology innovation team, they have a lot of competing priorities and other systems to take care of,” Swift said.
The two weeks of testing time once required is now down to just three days, relieving Enble’s people of tedious, repetitive work, while improving their capacity to keep pace with vendor upgrades as they emerge.
“This is just a starting point, too,” Swift said. “As we continue figuring out the full capability of the Assurity Cloud, there will be further capacity for automation.”
Enable’s calculations showed a “dollars and cents” payback of under three years for the solution cost. On top of that, there were also other long-term benefits such as improvements in software quality and reductions in demands on worker time.
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