New app transforms the whole business

About the customer

Rock2Recovery delivers rapid help for veterans leaving the services with stress-related illness. A team of Specialist Change Management Coaches use individual coaching, workshops, a helpline, and peer support to help individuals refocus their lives. Having started with veterans, Rock2Recovery now receives a growing number of clients from the ‘blue light’ services and saves up to 30 lives a year.

Vital need to help veterans

Rock2Recovery (R2R) is an inspirational UK organisation that was founded in 2015 by Jamie Sanderson and Jason Fox following long careers as senior ranking Royal Marines Commando non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and instructors.

They recognised the need to deliver rapid help for veterans leaving the services with issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The team of Specialist Change Management Coaches now help individuals find the ‘rock’ that will help them to refocus their lives and, in some cases, actually save lives.

R2R had become a victim of its own success. In 2015, R2R dealt with 70 clients but by 2020 this was over 750 and its homegrown Excel-based back-office systems could no longer cope.

New route to rapid development

“Our problem was making sure that our data is secure and that we can have rapid access to our clients or their next of kin if they are in trouble,” says Charlie Hobson, Welfare Officer and Company Secretary, Rock2Recovery. “Having strong systems that work is more than just keeping a business afloat. It’s about saving lives.” R2R relies on donations so good reporting is also vital to keep its donors informed and enable the business to survive.

Fujitsu’s approach to collaborate and understand the challenge began by spending two days with R2R to understand more about the organisation and how it operates. To increase that understanding and pinpoint the requirements a Virtual Co-Creation Experience session was held in Fujitsu’s Digital Transformation Centre (DTC) – this was a virtual session due to COVID-19. Principal needs were to automate back-office processes, leaving coaches free to do their vital work, and provide an application suitable for both mobile and tablet devices.

The outcome of the discussions gave a clear indication that a new solution was needed around an app to support the coaches and the back-office. Expertise for that came from Fujitsu and its partner, OutSystems, which are both experienced in building applications faster, more efficiently, and at less cost. Fujitsu brought together an array of people, methodologies, and tools and within five days, R2R had a fully functioning, tested, and enhanced system which had already started saving lives.

To produce rapid results, Fujitsu decided to use the OutSystems platform which is an agile cloud solution that uses the concept of low code to automate many development processes.

Fujitsu also decided that its new Multi Experience Development (MXD) product would be ideal for this engagement. MXD is all about being able to rapidly build applications using low-code technology, drastically improving the speed at which you can get a business application out to the end users. It provides both the design and agile development capabilities to offer a rapid way of developing applications.

A small Fujitsu team was put together which included apprentices. In just three days they built a database, the screens, validated the data, and created workflow management. By day three, they realised that they were ahead of schedule so took on some additional requirements. They extended the ability to record the clinical risk scores by adding logic to the calculation so that this could be done automatically by the programme. They also built a completely automated self-billing system.

Every day, new builds were demonstrated to R2R to get feedback and plan priorities. The end solution included a back-office app for welfare officers and a mobile app for coaches. The highly scalable mobile solution includes client session management and scheduling, a clinical risk score survey and calculation tool, a client commitment agreement with automatic client email links, and automatic client feedback requests.

Back-office functions include automatic invoicing, along with reconciliation and approval of invoices, coach set-up and management, donor and sponsor data recording and reporting, and full management reporting. Also, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been introduced to automate some of the reporting and invoicing activity. This has reduced invoicing time from six days down to 30 minutes.

This ambitious project would traditionally have taken three months, but it took just five days and has transformed the efficiency with which R2R works.

In those five days, Fujitsu provided:

Ultimate tribute to life-saving app

Paying the ultimate tribute to its new systems, Hobson concludes: “A client decided to end his life on the first Friday after we’d started the app. Instead of the coach having to ring in and get someone to look at the old database to try and find the next of kin, phone them, then phone 999, she used the data to do it herself. She instantly phoned his wife who stopped him and, at the same time, she phoned the ambulance. He is now being looked after by an NHS crisis team so there’s a family that has been saved from disaster, purely because of this app.”