Versus Arthritis are a new charity here to demand and deliver better for people with arthritis across the UK. Alongside volunteers, healthcare professionals, researchers and friends, Versus Arthritis do everything they can to push back against arthritis. Previously Arthritis Research UK and Arthritis Care, the two charities joined forces in 2018 so that together, they could continue to develop breakthrough treatments, campaign relentlessly for arthritis to be a priority and provide support and advice to people living with arthritis whenever they need it.
Business Needs
Versus Arthritis required the development of an automated solution to quickly pass data between their CRM system and a Business Partners’ order fulfilment system. The solution would speed up and enhance a Supporter’s experience whilst placing phone based orders or donations, as well as avoiding any need for Customer Service staff to dual key relevant details.
Why Black Marble?
Black Marble has an internationally recognised team of Azure DevOps and Integration experts, and a proven track record of delivering and supporting our solutions. Add to this our status as a Microsoft Gold partner of more than 15 years, Black Marble stood out amongst the competition, easily being able to provide Versus Arthritis with a solution that was right for them.
The solution
To timely synchronise customer details between their systems, Versus Arthritis turned to Azure DevOps, a cloud development solution for DevOps management and integration. Black Marble implemented the solution using Azure Logic Apps, which delivered a low cost and scalable solution to the issue and provided a great degree of flexibility in cross technology integration and inherent cloud resilience. The integrated solution increased staff efficiency by almost two thirds in comparison to the original manual input.
Black Marble also created ARM templates to make the deployment, configurations and resources consistent between each environment. Versus Arthritis had the security of a 1 click deploy which would provision the Azure resources back to its original state if required.
Versus Arthritis had previously experienced Logic Apps integration silently failing so they needed to ensure this would not happen again. Black Marble used Application Insights and Log Analytics to create a Service Dashboard to surface critical application data and errors to ensure any errors did not go unnoticed.
Knowledge Sharing
Throughout the engagement, Black Marble worked closely with the team at Versus Arthritis via continuous calls and status updates. This ensured that Versus Arthritis were able to quickly feedback the status of the project to other areas within the business.
Black Marble provided an in-depth handover and Azure DevOps knowledge transfer, demonstrating build and release pipelines, ARM templates, Application Insights and Log Analytics. Our approach enabled Versus Arthritis to apply the skills learnt to other projects within their company.
Benefits
- Versus Arthritis team gained DevOps knowledge that can be applied to their future projects.
- Increased staff efficiency.
- Reduced data discrepancies.
- Better visibility of application data.
- Easier error monitoring and handling.
- Continued support from Black Marble through our tailored support contract.
The full case study is here.
