Capstone Technology delivers practical software and training solutions to process manufacturers worldwide.

Capstone Technology engaged iTrellis to Assess their organization. As a result of our assessment findings and recommendations, we were asked to help Capstone Technology adopt new Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) techniques based on a lightweight implementation of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).

Creating lasting change in an organization can be a lengthy, delicate, and challenging process. We accelerated the change process by having our consultants join their development team, which allowed us to understand how they were doing things and also demonstrate our recommendations. Capstone is similar to many of our other clients in that they were doing a number of SAFe activities already. We helped them get their existing development workflow streamlined into a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) rhythm, while at the same time introducing new roles and tools such as Git. iTrellis also helped Capstone better utilize their existing tools, such as TFS – taking advantage of Team Services and not just using it as a code repository.

Joining their team also allowed us to introduce change over time. This helped us make sure that we introduced new roles, processes, and technologies in a logical order at an acceptable pace – while simultaneously delivering valuable new features to their Software Product Suite. We feel that working side by side with our clients on projects offers the best vector for team adoption. Success adoption leads to predictable, transparent, and steady software deliveries which helps both the Capstone business team as well as their clients.

Please contact us if you would like an Assessment of your organization, Training on SAFe based CI/CD techniques, or Feature Driven Development projects!

PSESD helps to improve the quality, equity, and efficiency of educational programs through partnerships with K-12 education, early learning, higher education, and public and private organizations.

PSESD recognizes that technology can solve fundamental problems in education, especially where children are most at risk, and has engaged us as technology experts toward that end. iTrellis supported the construction of this student-focused software suite.  Our software facilitates the exchange of student information, enabling children to transfer schools more quickly and engage with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) more effectively–providing the most significant benefits to the most at-risk students.

Our role in this project was originally to develop and support the underlying technology that made the information exchange possible. As the project went on, our role expanded, and we partnered with the client on how to manage the multi-vendor development program as a streamlined software development workflow. As a federally funded project, we maximized the use of open-source technologies in order to keep costs down and drew on the strengths of a number of different underlying technologies in the overall system design.

The Savers family of stores is a for-profit, global thrift retailer offering great quality, gently used clothing, accessories and household goods. Our business model of purchasing, reselling and recycling gives communities a smart way to shop and keeps more than 700 million pounds of used goods from landfills each year. We also help more than 120 nonprofit organizations by paying them for donated goods, which supports their vital community programs and services.  Savers has 330 locations and have 22,000 employees.

Our engagement focused on migrating an on-premise accounting backend to an Azure-based solution. A number of systems (sales orders, invoices, payroll etc) were integrated directly into the old backend in ways incompatible with the new, so much work was required to integrate old data formats and messages into the new formats and for all of the systems to communicate smoothly again.

Rather than building a suite of custom applications, which would incur considerable development, operating, and maintenance costs, we decided to solve this problem via Mulesoft Anypoint, a tool designed specifically for this kind of integration work.  It enabled us to develop a diverse set of integrations much more rapidly than building individual integrations via traditional methods.  Additionally, it provides excellent workflow visualizations which we are utilizing to better communicate our efforts to non-technical stakeholders so that they can more fully engage with product demonstrations.

While much of this project is done at a higher level than writing code, Mulesoft is flexible–written on Java, and it allows a developer to drop in custom components for things like transforming data, writing files, and connecting to particular systems.  Mulesoft also provides the means necessary for us to utilize a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline with gated check-ins and Automated Testing, so that we continue to adhere to best practices.

Please contact us to discuss how iTrellis can support your Systems Integration needs!

The Silveus Insurance Group‘s mission is to enrich the lives of American farmers by helping them manage risk.  What began in the 1930’s in one Indiana county has grown into the nation’s leading private crop insurance agency. Today, SIG continues to help farmers manage risk by developing private products, delivering the highest level of customer service, and creating superior risk management technologies.

iTrellis was engaged by SIG to help align business goals with development efforts, increase delivery speed, and produce new and innovative risk management and insurance application processing software. Over time, iTrellis and SIG have formed a strong development partnership, engaging along every dimension of our Services Model. Our partnership has allowed iTrellis to work in a large, complex, and unique business domain alongside an existing development team from SIG who really understand Agriculture.

As a result, the combined team has helped improve the ability for SIG executives to plan for the business’s longer-term goals, and better understand where technology can help achieve those goals.  This project has also provided opportunities for iTrellis to introduce new technologies such as web services, AngularJS, Git, and Azure, as well as agile methodologies such as Sprints, Code Reviews, Continuous Integration and Continuous deployment. These practices and technologies have improved development productivity and quality while the organization continues to serve a dynamic and productive customer base.

Please contact us if you are looking for a business systems development Partner!