Fuelsuite - Maximising the Return from Fueling Environments

Environmental Monitoring Solutions (EMS) is a global specialist in statistical inventory reconciliation (SIR) leak detection, real-time fuel analysis and fuel system automation. With over 25 years of experience, EMS is an industry leader, innovator and disruptor. Wanting to expand their existing product and service offering to help customers achieve environmental compliance, EMS sought to provide a solution that would deliver around the clock monitoring of fuel activity and events.

EMS engaged with leading technology solutions provider DiUS to help them achieve their goals. DiUS prides itself on helping companies innovate and grow by developing custom-designed technology solutions. Its agile and lean approach mobilises the development of its customers initiatives. By starting small, engaging the user community and iteratively building on its value proposition to achieve speed to market, DiUS gives its customers a competitive advantage.

The challenge

EMS understood that to be successful in a changing market, they needed to embrace a more nimble way of delivering a digital experience. Wanting a web-based application that would improve the customer’s experience, support environmental compliance and enable remote asset monitoring of fuel activity and events, EMS sought the help of DiUS to build ‘just enough’ to deliver what their customers wanted, rather than developing a costly solution that would be hard to maintain.

EMS’s legacy system delivered a clunky and slow data entry and reporting experience for users, was built on older technology and was not responsive to the many devices customers now use. In addition, the legacy system was a commercial off-the-shelf product; making it costly to run, difficult to integrate with other systems, and meant that product updates and new feature releases required multi party involvement, often resulting in no development.

Ben Howell, EMS Development Manager said “DiUS’ use of cutting edge development technologies ensured we met our release targets on time. Their pre-development hands on end-user testing ensured features were developed once without having to continually loop back making iterative changes. The end result is a software and application platform that is scalable, secure and affords us very rapid development sprints without sacrificing quality, security or stability.”

Building ‘just enough’

Starting small, DiUS facilitated a two day inception workshop; bringing together key stakeholders from across the business to develop a shared understanding of the business needs, product vision, technology landscape, integration requirements and success criteria.

With the foundation in place, user research was conducted early on. The team undertook on-site guerrilla usability testing to understand how the petrol station attendants and assets operated. This was to ensure the first iteration of the data entry screens were inline with the application workflow that was being developed.

Being mindful of building the right thing, the team delivered incrementally and iteratively - starting with a minimum viable product (MVP). Hosted on Amazon Web Services, the MVP provided a single, simple and easy to use data entry view of a customer’s site to help them monitor fuel activity and events.

The final stage of product development saw an expansion of the MVP to support multiple sources of information, providing appropriate views for each context of use and additional functions to allow the customer to drill down and analyse their data.

Russell Dupuy Managing Director of EMS said “The key business requirements of this ground up investment were that it must be responsive, scalable, multi-language, support seamless failover redundancy - and avoid costly proprietary development suites.”

Round the clock monitoring

In just three months, from ideation to release, EMS launched Fuelsuite; an intelligent remote monitoring and 24/7 support service that keeps EMS customer sites operational around the clock. Fuelsuite provides customers with a single interface; negating the need for multiple and disparate third party applications, whilst helping to reduce environmental exposure and lower maintenance budgets.