Upgraded features and market differentiation: RH Environmental

RH Environmental provides consultancy services to government bodies worldwide to support their regulatory and compliance requirements.

The problem

“We had software. It wasn’t working very well, and we couldn’t achieve our goals from it.”

“Our vision was to bring more intelligent ways of working to our customer base.”

– Robert Halford, RHE Managing Director

RH Environmental wanted to improve its customer-facing document management system in the following ways:

• Maximise customer value from the system – new features, better performance, etc.
• Differentiate themselves from their competition (e.g. generic systems like Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Docs).
• Migrate existing customers to the new system with minimal disruption.

The solution

Firstly, we worked with RH Environmental to put together a comprehensive project scoping exercise. Here, we focused on three key objectives:

1. Upgraded functionality to address user needs

illumo digital conducted extensive research with RH Environmental’s customers. We identified typical customer user groups (or ‘personas’), and performed over 150 tests and 20 prototype iterations. One upgraded feature was a sophisticated search function which could also scan the body of documents – some of which are in a proprietary format.

2. Greater processing capability

We designed the software so it could:

• Cope with the over 1 million document revisions per day.
• Serving users across the world in real-time with zero downtime tolerance.
• Scale capacity for future increases in demand.

3. Cloud-based system

RH Environmental wanted to move away from traditional software licensing, software installs and the need for customer hardware.

It wanted a cloud-based system that could compete with systems like Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Docs.

4. We also provided …

• Consultancy and advice on how to launching the product to existing target markets, plus international markets.
• Training and support for RH Environmental system admins.
• Implementation plan, including an overnight go-live date for the first full release. (Zero disruption to its 3,300 daily users!)
• New features to be added to the system – which included a costed roadmap of planned releases.
• IT infrastructure services – hardware and hybrid cloud hosting.

The Outcome

RH Environmental has benefited in the following ways:

• Gained more value from the solution than they expected – all within months of deployment.
• Differentiated itself from its competition – including Microsoft and Google.
• Substantially expanded its market share of UK local authorities (now over 200).
• Penetrated new markets on 3 continents with low marginal cost.
• Stayed on budget, and delivered the system release without error.
• Incurred zero downtime during the system transition (3,300 users, overnight).
• Gained positive customer feedback. Many users are ‘much more confident in the reliability of the system.’
• Became recognised as the UK industry standard in document management for environmental compliance.

The Future

We continue to happily support and develop RH Environmental’s system.

“The future with Helastel (now illumo digital) is confident. We know we can work with them – they’ve proved that they can help us realise our ambitions.”
– Robert Halford, RHE Managing Director