UP TO THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY

Completely new user experience to secure future product sales

Track and Trace is a successful (SaaS) product of RAM Mobile Data for fleet management. 

RAM were looking for a partner with extensive experience in modern web technologies to design and implement a completely new interface. As part of the selection process, we built a prototype that showed how we could improve the interaction and user experience of the product substantially.

The result was a modern interface that provided the users with new interaction flow and better performance. The new experience was efficient and enjoyable because of the less time and effort for performing tasks and the appealing look and feel of the UI.

Gateway for two-way vehicle communication

Greenwheels is the largest car-sharing corporation in the Netherlands and operates also in Germany.

As part of their Fleet Sharing Platform for Greenwheels, we developed and supported a vehicle communication gateway. The gateway provides a generic interface between a vehicle for car-sharing and renting scenarios and various other business systems.

The gateway communicates with a vehicle over GPRS and occasionally SMS to both send high-level commands as “Open the door”, “Authorize driver”, etc. and receive vital data on the vehicle status as mileage, current state, and position, tank level, etc.

The gateway was implemented for communication with Renault and Volkswagen cars.

A solution for tracking and calculating mobility compensations of construction workers in Belgium

In Belgium, construction workers get mobility compensation for some of the trips they perform between their home, office, and construction sites. The companies were using Excel to calculate the compensations and the process was cumbersome and prone to errors.

Up2 was requested to build a web-based application to provide advanced mechanisms for automating the process of compensation calculations and reporting.

The result was a solution in which compensation calculations are done with a button click based on dynamic input criteria. For less than a year about 150 companies started using the system and dropped entirely the manual process.

Bike Rentals and Parkings Processing Solution

The Dutch national railroad company NS offers a convenient bike rental membership and bicycle storage services at almost 300 rental locations in the Netherlands. Over 100,000 members use the service.

In 2013, Up2 was asked to design and build the part of the platform that handles thousands of rental and parking transactions and applies complex logic for calculating rental and parking prices for end-users and resellers. The other parts of the platform were built by different vendors and the integration was a major issue. The system went live in 2014 and was maintained and extended until 2018.

In 2017, we worked in partnership with info.nl to build a new highly performant system based on modern architecture and design. End of 2018 the new system successfully went live.

Patient and Trip Management System for the Dutch Ambulance Services

In 2011, to meet the changing business requirements, Dutch Ambulance Services in Amsterdam and 6 other regions, needed a more advanced business system to support the complex patient and financial workflow of the emergency trips.

Together with our partner Navara we built an integrated platform for the registration of the ambulance care – advanced management of emergency trips, patient’s data, and financial operations of the ambulance services with the insurance companies and hospital organizations and pre-announcements to the hospital emergency room.

Process improvement has resulted in a significant decline in work on trip administration.

Mobility Hub for Specialized Transportation services

In the Netherlands the government provides fixed budget and preferential prices for multiple transportation services to people with reduced mobility.

Transvision is a company that provides such transport services. Up2 was selected to design and develop VAES – a Mobility Hub for combining and providing various transport services in a unified way.

VAES was designed from the ground up to provide the most optimal transportation services to those people based on their budget and eligibility for a service.

Its robust architecture is intended to allow adding new transportation services (such as free-floating cars, Greenwheels, OV-Fiets) without much development efforts and costs so the system can offer multi-modal trips.

ProRail is a Dutch government organization that is responsible for the maintenance and extensions of the national railway network infrastructure and traffic control.

Using our Control&Monitoring framework - Maplese, we implemented several projects to improve train schedule predictability.

• Railroad switch monitoring to secure their operational state in the winter
• Railroad crossing, measuring closing times and the impact along tracks of new train schedules
• Weather stations to measure local in comparison to predicted weather

With this project, ProRail gained insights they were unable to before. How much time did they block the public road network? Are there barriers that close so quickly they could hit a passer-by? Are there barriers that close so slowly that they could block a vehicle on the railroad?

Showcase

Train security and maintenance

NedTrain is the locomotive and rolling stock maintenance and repair company of the Dutch Railways company, NS. Security officers who are responsible for detailed security and maintenance checks of the trains used to do this on paper.

To improve the process, a mobile app for doing the checks on the spot was introduced. The testing instructions and applicable requirements often change so it was not efficient to keep them locally on the device.

Up2 was asked to design and build a monitoring system for managing the trains' specifications centrally, providing always updated data to the devices and collecting the results from trains' maintenance checks.

The new system resulted in a huge decrease in manual work.

Lightweight, cross-platform, highly performant framework for building monitoring solutions

We built Maplese to provide infrastructure for connecting, collecting, and transforming huge amounts of data from sensors and devices.

Maplese provides out-of-the-box units for critical events and anomalies notifications, local data storage, and forwarding data to various channels for further use and processing.

It comes with a real-time dashboard. This has proven to be essential since dashboarding tools are often limited to handle real-time data.
The system can be hosted on-premises or out on the field and can run without an Internet connection.

Maplese on-device approach helps reduce latency for critical applications, lower dependency on the cloud, and better manage the massive deluge of data generated by sensors and devices.

Monitoring moveable bridges

Rijkswaterstaat is the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. As there is a lot of water in the Netherlands, there are a lot of bridges too.

Partnering with Sogeti, we run a pilot monitoring 20 movable bridges in Amsterdam for RWS.

We used Maplese - our control&monitoring framework for building the solution. The state of the bridge (open or close) is visualized and updated in real-time on a map. Device temperature and the battery voltage which are important for monitoring the state of the devices were also tracked on the dashboard. A historical timeline graph widget displays what time and how long a bridge was open or closed.

KPN has launched its LORA IoT network. One of the issues encountered was the cumbersome testing of the installed LORA gateways.

The various KPN contractors had a testing device to send messages. To view the network results, they had to sign in using a laptop with RSA keys to KPN network systems.

Maplese was used to simplify network testing during the roll-out of gateways. ​We securely combined the real-time data from the LORA gateways, the testing devices, and the network systems. After sending a test message to gateways, the test results were displayed on a single interface.

We also provided a heat map, so KPN could follow in real-time the progress of the roll-out.

Onshore real-time monitoring

Damen is an international shipyard group. To improve their service proposition for shipowners, Damen needed a ships’ real-time information onshore.

We used Maplese, our framework to implement a remote monitoring solution for their yacht support vessel – the “Game Changer”.

The solution tracked the ship location, together with information from its vital systems – Praxis Alarm Monitoring System, Engine Room, Navigation, and Fuel tanks.

The amount of data (from the navigation system and from the Praxis system onboard) is very large and the frequency of data sensing is 1 sec, for some messages even less so data was filtered and processed to visualize only the one that makes sense.

Unique auctioning and booking site for hotel rooms

Hotelarious was a new concept to create a safe online marketplace for hotel rooms, where hotel operators and consumers could negotiate and settle a price. Unlike normal hotel booking sites, with Hotelarious a consumer could bid on a number of rooms. If one of the hotel operators thought the time and the price was right, then the bid could be accepted.

Up2 was contracted to design and build the application architecture for the Hotelarious website, marketplace back-office, extranet for the hotel-operators, and integration with hotel management software.

The result was a complete hotel room marketplace application with booking, bidding, and auctioning functionality.

Central Place to manage your scientific interests

Elsevier is the leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical content.

In 2018 the new GDPR law pushed organizations towards a standard and unified way of managing the data, consent, and preferences of their users. The transition was a massive undertaking for Elsevier as an international organization with multiple branches and subsidiaries.

In this transformation, Up2 was selected to build the system that translates the data coming from all the different systems of their products and subsidiaries, into a common and unified set of user preferences.

The Preference Centre provides a UI for Elsevier’s users to manage their preferences. The combined information is forwarded to Adobe Campaign – the central system used for communicating with Elsevier’s users.

A global web infrastructure for leading herd improvement company

CRV is one of the leading herd improvement companies in the world that provides expertise and online tools to help farmers improve their herds and business operations.

In 2014, Up2 was chosen as the IT partner to rebuild the new web application for the Dutch and Belgium offices. By 2020 that number has grown to over 20+ international sites to support CRV worldwide operations.

The result is a single code base for both front-end and back-end, additionally tweaked to serve all the CRV sites and integration with custom extensions and business systems such as CRV's webshop, Amyoon for CRM, Active Directory for access control, CDN for improved performance.

Trading solar energy platform for individuals, companies and small energy producers

As an innovative energy company, Alliander stimulates the use of solar energy by small companies and individuals. Normally unused energy is released to the grid of the energy company at a standard price per Kwh.

Alliander wanted to learn if it is feasible to allow companies and people to trade unused energy capacity.

Up2 won the contest to build a platform that provides real-time information on energy production and unused capacity and members can trade extra capacity. The system connected with smart energy meters and with the back-offices from cooperating energy companies to process the trade results on the invoices of the users.

200 individuals and small companies participated in the pilot. They recorded additional profits of trading solar energy on their energy bill.

An integrated digital personal environment for education

Founded in 1986, the RINO is the Amsterdam based national organization for continuing education and training in the field of mental health.

The need for a new website coincided with the corporate style revamp. Next to visual enhancements the goal was to improve search and order processes of RINO courses. On the operational side the requirement was to connect RINO custom backend to the new web application.

The next project was My Rino. The target was to unite all the different systems of the institute, both technically and visually, and build a personal digital portal for RINO users.

Up2 was responsible for designing and building the new application. The result is a new modern application that connects several systems of RINO•amsterdam and automates the processes which otherwise would be done manually.

A network of web portals for the Royal Dutch Transport organization

The Royal Dutch Transport organization (Koninklijk Nederlands Vervoer, KNV) is the umbrella organization for companies that offer bus, taxi, healthcare, public, and rail freight transportation services.

KNV used to have six different sites, each with its own design and custom CMS which was hard to manage and maintain. The organization has approached us to rebuild its digital landscape. The main goals were to improve and simplify the processes of content management and to provide a more appealing look and better usability to their audience.

The outcome is a portal network where all KNV applications are integrated for efficiency and centralized management.

Alert system on the latest information on regulatory requirements for international trade

The WTO manages trade agreements in the world and is obliged to notify other countries about changes in trade regulations. The issue with the so-called trade notifications is their timely distribution to all WTO members. The WTO has all the information in place in their internal systems, but its distribution lacks.

United Nations department DESA was concerned with timely information for the poorest countries in the world as they need it to prepare for changes. Therefore, the ePing initiative was started.

Up2 designed and built an integrated solution that collects trade notifications from WTO systems and distributes them on time world-wide to national governments and companies.