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Charity Background
“Community First is a charity that looks after other charities and makes the charity and voluntary sector the best it can be across Hampshire.” – Tim Houghton, Chief Executive Officer
Community First’s Transport services are designed to ensure service users make the most of your day. They offer and manage bookable minibus services, Connect, which operates in various locations across Hampshire for anyone whose access needs are not met by public transport services.
Their services are designed to be accessible for everyone and is not restricted to registered disabled or people that use mobility aids to be eligible.
Client: Community First
Industry: Charity
Services: IT Support Services, Microsoft 365, Data Security
Challenge
Community First have a very busy transport department that serves the community across Hampshire with daily community bus services that can be ordered by service users on the day.
The bespoke transport system was developed locally a number of years earlier around an SQL database and implemented on local servers in each area. Community First schedulers could only gain access to the server in their location while in the office and remote access was difficult due to the setup of the system.
“We have teams across 7 districts and deliver transport services across these districts. We’ve had a number of different booking systems with staff based in different offices using a community access system which is standardised across Hampshire. That system required us to have staff in different locations to take bookings.” – Tim Houghton
These setup issues included the security, backup and business continuity of each server which had to be managed separately.
As the system became older, possible failures of any of the servers was seen as a critical point of failure for the service in a geographical area which would impact transport system scheduling and operation.
Community First was also working in collaboration with other local authority partners to redevelop a new transport system for a wider area and, therefore, wanted to extend the life of the legacy system until any new system was implemented.
We’ve got huge changes in Hampshire around population growth, in terms of aging population, in terms of the dispersed nature of our population. So, for things like some of our transport planning and our transport services, where do our buses need to be? Where do our buses likely need to go to? Where are the new developments happening? How can we use that AI and other technologies to start planning future services and futureproof some of the services that we deliver at the moment?
Tim Houghton, Chief Executive Officer
Solution
Due to our previous work and strong relationship with Community First, they looked to Vissensa to help them tackle this project.
Vissensa came up with a plan which would mitigate any danger of disrupting the current operation of the system, while solving the business continuity concerns, and make all transport SQL databases available to any Transport system scheduler, regardless of their location. It would also make the reporting of the activities of the entire transport operation more streamlined.
Vissensa implemented an Azure cloud service that supported all instances of the transport database and, to minimise the cost, developed a schedule that turned the service off at night and back on in the morning to minimise Azure spend. The new system was grouped as one instance and could be backed using immutable backups to multiple targets to ensure resilience.
Following user training the new service was made operational and Community First’s Finance Director Tanya Dowthwaite commented that “…moving the transport systems to a cloud environment with Vissensa was seen as a critical step to protect the service from data loss, but it quickly became apparent that access to all the transport system databases transformed how Community First transport schedulers, managers and drivers operated and gave a new and co-ordinated insight as to how the resources in the service could be best deployed.”
And Tim commented “…it means we don’t need to have one or two staff in very particular locations and offices, costing us more money. The IT has saved us money and enabled us to work smarter.”
