Serving the Teesside Business Community | 19
Applied Integration has taken a big step towards completing an innovative project that could help the firm win more blue-chip contracts.
The award-winning technology firm is working in collaboration with Teesside University in a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership( KTP) designed to encourage businesses to improve their competitive edge through the use of emerging expertise and innovative technologies.
Funded by government grants and sponsorship, KTP is a nationwide programme helping businesses improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of the UK’ s knowledge, technology and skills-base.
Applied Integration is working with academics within the university’ s School of Computing to radically redesign the Stokesley firm’ s in-house project development framework.
The project will develop software to streamline Applied Integration’ s in-house processes, with the aim of reducing costs
Working closely with Teesside University are Applied Integration directors, from left: Garry Lofthouse, Roy Coleman, Lee Raywood and Graham King.
KTP set to give big advantage
and development time associated with the production of hybrid critical systems. It is focusing on the introduction of internal processes to ensure client requirements are clearly understood at the very outset of major projects.
The KTP could save Applied Integration – and its customers – substantial time and money, giving the systems integrator a competitive advantage in a challenging and increasingly demanding market.
Phase 1 of the software framework- named ReqCap, short for Requirement Capture Tool – is now complete, with engineers trailing the tool set giving it highly positive feedback. Now Phase 2 is underway, with work ongoing to generate automatic test cases from user requirements.
The software tool allows Applied Integration engineers to represent customer user requirements of the firm’ s automation and control system, using a graphical modelling language which, when fully developed, will allow their engineers to automatically generate high level sequential flow charts( SFC’ s). The SFC’ s will be primarily used to review and validate the original user requirements at an early point in a project, ensuring all parties understand the exact requirements of the project.
Leading the university’ s team of academics on the project is Dr Joao Ferreira, a senior lecturer and integral member of the university’ s Digital Futures Research Institute, while Ali Almohammad is working as an associate with the firm on the £ 108,000 KTP, with engineer Phil White supervising the project within Applied Integration.
Applied Integration director Garry Lofthouse said:“ Phase 1 completion of the project and software trialling has generated real excitement around the business. Projects previously delivered by Applied Integration have been used as test cases for the new software tool. A live fix-tracking and enhancement capture database ensures nothing will be missed during the design and development lifecycle of a project.
“ Completion of Phase 1 was a major milestone for the KTP and it’ s great to see our concept ideas of the how the tool would work coming to fruition. The support we’ ve received from Teesside University, particularly Dr Joao Ferreira and Gilly Hall, as well as from Innovate UK has been first class throughout the whole process.”