Empowering K12 students & young adults

How do you build and execute a solution when you need to help a non-profit organization conduct a state-wide technology competition to uncover talent?

GaETC (GA Educational Technology Consortium) organizes a statewide technology competition where students in grades 3-12 compete in a variety of technology categories. They have a lofty goal to promote technology skills through competition and challenge students to become leaders in a digital age.

Suri Anantharama (CTO of Sonline) was serving as a judge in the GaSTC event. There were volunteers galore and the organizing committee was working non-stop during the competition. On further discovery, it was learnt that the competition was a 9-month effort with a lot of manual tasks as students from schools all over GA schools participated without a central registration system.

Based on intense discussions and conversations with the core organizing committee, Sonline offered to build a solution in the AWS cloud platform to facilitate easy registration, ranking of students at different levels (school, district, state) and also lining them up for the state competition. Sonline partnered with the RESA representatives to gather detailed requirements and came up with a robust solution design using the Open Source stack. The goal was to build a solution that is easy to use, and at the same time cost-effective without compromising on the quality or performance.

Our final solution included a role based portal, metadata management, superuser reports, in addition to handling the student registration in a seamless manner. Later, it was integrated with Microstrategy to produce real-time dashboards for the committee.

Sonline helped us create the GaSTC registration system. The change from our old system to the new system is amazing. It is also easy to use, and the feedback is excellent from parents & teachers.

Aaron Griffin, Board Member, GaSTC

GaSTC solution was well appreciated by the GA schools and Sonline sponsored the event along with Google, GA Aquarium, and Middle GA State university. Every year, when GaSTC is conducted, we are very happy to see the eager and competitive students showcase their talents like game design, programming, web development, and mobile apps creation.

No wonder Steven Covey said “Begin with the end in mind”

Region: Americas
Industry: Education
Keywords: Web Development, K12, Registration, Student competition

Show the real savings in 5 minutes..!

How do you showcase the cost savings to your retail customer in a few minutes and help them to decide on a purchase ?

Sortimo is a leading manufacturer of van racking systems, mobile transport solutions and shelf systems for lightweight commercial vehicles headquartered in Germany with presence in 35 countries employing more than 1000 personnel. The USA location is very active and growing and they come up with innovative ways to engage customers.

Sonline serves as an IT consulting partner and solutions provider for Sortimo. We participated in discussions with the senior management and there was a proposal to build a Cost Calculator to drive sales. The proposed tool would capture key data points from the prospective customers and help them understand the true ROI.

We co-created the solution that would help prospects to go through a set of simple questions and the tool would uncover the working pattern of the individual to arrive at key costs.

The solution consisted of 8 key steps that would inquire about hours spent, miles driven, missing parts, buying patterns, inventory value, transport damages, hourly rate and more to arrive at ROI. This was well received and helped the marketing team articulate the benefits of the flagship product SR-5 and other shelf racking solutions.

Over the last couple of years, Sortimo North America has been working on various initiatives in sync with our company’s digitalization goals to create the highest value for customers. Sonline team has played an important role as technology advisor and partner to assist in projects ranging from our ERP decision to creating customer ROI project, and IT review as a whole.

Their technical acumen, attention to detail, responsiveness, and ability to execute within budgets, were of immense value to Sortimo.

Mahendra Srivastava, President, Sortimo of North America

Region: Americas
Industry: Manufacturing
Keywords: Web Development, ROI Tool, Cost Calculator

Helping the school district with Covid-19 data analysis

How do you analyze data from multiple sources to make important decisions like school closure during the pandemic?

Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) is the 5th largest school district in GA with more than 52,000 students. The school district cares deeply for STEM education supported by several magnet schools and also offers cognia (AdvancED) certified programs. CCPS had invested in the infrastructure with smart boards, laptops, android tabs to promote education in the county that has more than 12,000 students that are from minority groups and communities.

Suddenly, March 2020 sprang a surprise!!

With Covid-19 pandemic, lot of changes had to be done so swiftly and it was a challenge thrown at the CTO Mr. Rod Smith and his team to facilitate remote learning setup. In Spite of the time and resource limitations, IT personnel worked really hard to enable students to learn remotely. Six months later, it was time to take some important decisions related to re-opening the schools and explore the possibilities for face-to-face (F2F) instruction. CCPS wanted to leverage the data from various sources to make the decision and reached out to Sonline to work on the Covid-19 dashboard.

CCPS used Google Looker as their BI / Dashboard tool and chose us for the co-creation effort. Sonline helped the team to organize the data from multiple sources (state agencies, CDC, local county officials) and developed the Covid-19 dashboard.

CCPS board and decision makers utilized the Covid-19 dashboard and related data points to inform the constituents about the potential impact, make decisions like school closure, remote learning, awareness campaign, mask regulations and distributing safety instructions.

The solution was expanded by the team as we published it in CCPS website so that parents of school children can quickly review current covid-19 status.

This is a great example of how data analysis, integration and dashboards can help while handling a pandemic situation to ensure safety of our children and fellow citizens.

Region: Americas
Industry: Education
Keywords: K-12, BI / Dashboards, Covid-19, Google Looker

Uncover hidden services to improve IT Service Team effectiveness

How do you integrate tribal knowledge of the organization into your ITIL Service Catalog?

Customer is a local government agency with a strong IT leadership team. With more than $10 Million IT budget and 40 FTEs, this city management is focused on improving efficiency and effectiveness of the technology department. They adapted ITIL for their Service Desk management 2 decades ago and constantly strive to improve their FCR (First Call Resolution) and maintain the System availability above 99% (reduce the instances of any unscheduled downtimes)

We were invited to conduct a series of “Best practice Sessions” with the IT team as part of their continuous education program. Topics included Incident Management, Change Management, Project Management, Service Catalog review, ITIL Dashboard, and more.

One key assignment during the session was to review the Service Catalog and fill in the gaps. They had categorized service offerings into types such as hardware, network, web, vendor applications, communications, software support, cloud services, security and training. One additional type of service was marked as Other.

Sample Catalog (for representation purposes only)

During our discussions, we looked at the historical issues that were marked as “Miscellaneous” under the Other category totalling 23% of the expended resource time for the previous reporting period. Key items included

• Adhoc wifi support for the university research team leasing 3rd floor office for a special project (they could not categorize it as they built a separate network for 20 students camped in the agency building)
• Support neighboring cities on their Zero-Day / Cyber Security Awareness campaign and this task was part of the outreach program initiated by the leadership to help out small cities in the country
• Dev / QA servers work and stress testing of ERP add-on modules. This was one of the projects where a new PM failed to estimate the testing hours properly and support team had to put it under Other to avoid cost overruns
• DB restoration, App restoration, and PILOT user coordination to comply with the requirement as per BC / DR document

This exercise revealed a lot of interesting items. Agency IT leadership was playing an active role in taking up new strategic initiatives and did not spend enough time with the operations to ensure proper resource allocation. Team members were reluctant to voice their concerns as they wanted to make sure the bosses were happy.

Our ITIL review helped them understand the “Hidden Services” provided by the team and helped to uncover the tribal knowledge from key team members. We ended up creating new services like

• External Agency Support
• Disaster Simulation
• KTLO (activities performed to Keep The Lights On)
• Adhoc PMO Support
• Community IT Support

Proper categorization of IT services is fundamental to improve service organization effectiveness and understand training needs. In some scenarios, it would help to create a balance between wants and needs.

What are your Hidden Services?

Challenge your IT team today or we can uncover them for you!!

Region: Americas
Industry: Government
Keywords: ITIL, Best Practices, Service Catalog

SQL Integration - Robotic process automation for higher efficiency

How do you get your CAMA sync with ArcGIS?

Customer is a local government agency using WinGAP and ArcGIS (ESRI) like 100 other agencies in the State of Georgia. It is a small county with less than 8 members in the Technology department and they had additional responsibilities to handle courts, jails and sometimes help out small cities too.

WinGAP is a CAMA (Computer Aided Mass Appraisal) system that helps country governments to manage the appraisal process of residential homes, commercial properties, mobile homes, and more. ESRI ArcGIS provides real-time parcel information, GIS asset details, and interactive search for county maps and is very handy during emergency response.

Sonline was tasked to work on the integration. The primary objective is to provide GIS spatial visibility into valuable information contained in the WINGAP database that includes owner, sales, real prop, and more that could be used by all departments and the public to make accurate decisions using real-time data. This solution integrated Wingap & GIS databases on the backend leveraging SSIS whereas GIS lookup screens could provide the latest information on sales, owner, and real prop data.

The information was then pushed out to the web for public use, which provides strength to the many commercial agencies that use the data and the residents.

Our project helped to reduce foot traffic to county offices, reduction in phone calls as information is available online, saved county staff resource time, and eliminated manual errors during data mapping.

Do you have WinGAP - ArcGIS Integration in place?

Local government agencies realize the immense benefit through our backend integration approach. Our ability to connect commonly used systems like Tyler Munis, Paymentus, WinGAP, ESRI ArcGIS, TriTech IMC, Service Desk, 811 systems saves hundreds of hours spent on mundane, repetitive tasks by IT staff.

Please contact us and we would love to pass on the knowledge and make your life easy!

Region: Americas
Industry: Government
Keywords: WinGAP, ArcGIS, Integration, SSIS, SQL Server, Data Mapping