Growth Demands Innovation

In early 2011, during a period of steady growth we (Lucion Group Ltd) decided to address the growing concern that our software choices were becoming too complicated to scale with the company. We had somewhere in the region of 25 disparate programs and apps to manage different areas of our business and it was starting to impact our processes. We noticed the same of our competitors in the UK and abroad.

After a long search for an off-the-shelf solution we realised that the asbestos / hazard-management software market is crowded with outdated technology unfit for our long term strategy.

We decided to create an agile IT department to roll our own, and NexGen was the result. Since 2011 we have incorporated or obsoleted all 25 apps, meaning that NexGen is now the only program we need to run our business. Needless to say, the benefits of consolidating in this manner has seriously streamlined our company offering.

Economic Efficiency

NexGen has enabled Lucion Group Ltd to reduce it's average turnaround times for Asbestos Surveys from 2-weeks down to just 4 days.

We have made this possible by digitally connecting our various departments (Commercial, Laboratory, Surveying, Administration, Financial etc.) and creating realtime workloads that dictate tasks and predict future demand, ultimately allowing us to adequately prepare for busy periods and allocate extra work to quiet periods.

This connectivity has made each part of the process transparent accross the entire company, resulting in drastically improved cross-department communication.

Going Mobile

We have created a fit-for-purpose mobile-app for our surveyors and analysts, not a single tap, swipe or gesture is unnecessary; keeping our ground-team happy.

The importance of a well thought out user-experience cannot be understated, our top surveyors will create several hundred records per-day; no mean feat.

What's more, the instant that data is synchronised from the field it becomes accessible for our office-teams; they can start sketching floorplans and prepare to receive samples in the Lab.

Mapping

When dealing with thousands of sites and properties each week, geospacial information becomes increasingly important.

GPS coordinates are a first-class citizen in NexGen, we use them to verify pre-existing sites and help plan surveyor routes for maximum efficiency.

We have created some impressive tools that help navigate the 100,000 + Sites with ease and accuracy, above is a sample from our "cluster map system" that naturally groups-up sites, showing increasing granularity as you zoom in.

Continual Improvement

A dedicated team of software engineers work every day on NexGen and have a competitive advantage of being trained in all aspects of the industry. Our developers have working knowledge of all our business practices: from sales and management, to surveying, lab-work and even accounting.

We have adopted many tools and processes to make sure we continue to improve our offerring, including:

• The best of the Agile & DSDM frameork practices
• Extreme Programming
• Pair Programming
• Constant Feedback, Review & Updates

Every development "Sprint" sees us focus on a single feature or improvement and we push our work live every fortnight or so. According to github, in an average month we:

• Push 212 commits
• Change 4,653 files
• Make 344,154 changes

All in a safe, scalable environment, with benefits reaped instantly.

The Road Ahead

As well as refining and improving our existing features we have a long-term vision and backlog of new ideas for the future. Including:

Dynamic Floorplans

To compliment our best-in-industry reports we have been working to plot your Site floorplans directly onto google maps and highlight the locations where we have identified risks. We believe this will turn the time-consuming task of reading a long report into a quick, pleasurable and easily understandable experience.

Inventory of Hazardous Materials

Since we also offer non-asbestos related surveying (such as IHM identification in the marine environment) we will be updating our systems to cope with the demands of different products