Project Summaries

Policy Management System Leads to Better Tracking and Insights

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A major Canadian university was using an outdated policy management system that wasn’t flexible and couldn’t fit their growing business needs. They wanted to be able to keep track of correspondences within the system. They also wanted the ability to add fields (metadata for the documents that are stored for policies) and take away fields as became necessary. The old system was not user friendly and didn’t allow them to manage the policies as they would have liked. They needed a policy management system.  For example, when an email is sent out containing a document, they want to know who responded and how they responded.   The New Policy Management System … Read more

Automated Endowment Fund Reports Result in Quicker, More Streamlined Reporting 

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A major Canadian University wanted to automate the process of reporting endowment fund expenditures to faculties. The proceeds of endowment funds are used to support academic scholarships, bursaries, and research projects, and are a major component of large academic institutions and their fundraising efforts. Efficient reporting of these funds, their income, expenditures, and unspent balances allows faculties to support the students, scholars, and projects as intended by the donors, while remaining fiscally responsible and avoiding overspending. The existing highly manual and time-consuming process meant that the fund expenditures and balances were often out of date and funds with infrequent activity could easily be forgotten. Unspent funds were an unfortunate but … Read more

Application Upgrade Resolves Vulnerabilities and Security Issue

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After a software audit at an occupational health and testing company revealed several technical issues and security vulnerabilities within the customer’s core line of business applications, Imaginet was engaged to help identify the solution and lead the effort to resolve it. Due to the issues with the applications, we determined an application upgrade was needed.   The existing application was built as a .NET core 2.1 web app running on .NET Framework 4.8, with an Angular front-end client. While .NET Framework 4.8 is still supported, .NET Core 2.1 is not. The customer needed a solution that could be implemented in a matter of months, so rewriting the application from the ground … Read more

New Application Development Projects Enhance Resource Management 

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A telecommunications organization contacted Imaginet for assistance on 2 new application development projects. The first was a portfolio tracker, and the second was an office furniture ordering application.    Portfolio Tracker    The portfolio tracker we built for our client tracks and manages the various budgets they have across different departments. Our client has several districts and district managers, and they needed a way to track budgets across these districts and departments. Another aspect of the portfolio tracker is managing tech deployments within the organization. For example, if a boardroom needs a new projector (or other tech) they’ll go through a process to request the needed technology. Our tool allows for the … Read more

Data Collection Upgrade Reduces Technical Debt & Modernizes Data Reports

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food asked Imaginet to perform maintenance on their existing data collection processes. We work in a staff augmentation role for this client and do ongoing work for them. Their data departments are divided into different business areas (we will refer to them as teams). On this project, we were working with two of their teams. Both teams required general maintenance and updates to their data collection tools – essentially a data collection upgrade. Team 1: Their primary focus is collecting and processing data about pet foods and products (nutritional claims they make, calories, ingredients, product history, etc.). This process to … Read more

Power BI Data Model Builds Better and More Accurate Reports

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A major Canadian University had contacted Imaginet because they needed reports built on top of an existing data warehouse. This is a long-term client of Imaginet’s, and we had previously built a data warehouse for another department within the organization. Much of the work for this project was about defining the semantic data model on top of the data warehouse and then building the reports on it.   Before they had a data warehouse, they had multiple applications that were reporting data separately. Since the implementation of the data warehouse, the client wanted to use Power BI as a standard enterprise reporting portal.   Our Solution  We started with creating views in … Read more

Databricks Migration Saves Money and Improves Data Accessibility

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A provider of real estate advisory services contacted Imaginet for support on a system we had built for them a few years ago (mostly built using Azure SQL). They have multiple databases that have monthly costs associated with them. Our client was looking for a cheaper solution as the monthly costs were quite significant. They also had an existing capacity agreement with Databricks, so our goal was to conduct a Databricks migration with our clients databases.   What We Did  We started from scratch and built all the coordinates and objects for our client’s architecture. We used metadata to create their tables and developed a custom autoloader to transfer files to … Read more

Microsoft Purview Records Management Improves Business Record Storage 

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A major Canadian university contacted Imaginet because they desired a solution for managing their business records in SharePoint. Their Access and Privacy office is tasked with records management for the university and is currently managing their business records primarily in file shares. They are approaching 100 TB of business records that needed specific classifications – an extremely large volume. We determined Microsoft Purview Records Management would be an appropriate solution for our client.   Managing records in file shares presents usability and administration problems. A typical problem with file shares is that business records are often duplicated. Additionally, custom permissions on nested folder structures create tickets for internal IT teams, which … Read more

Modern DevOps Practices Lead to Better App Functionality 

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A leading Canadian retail logistics provider contacted Imaginet for a variety of application support. Broadly speaking, they needed assistance in managing several applications that had been written in the old .Net framework. These applications were poorly documented and lacked standardized build processes. Modernizing the applications was necessary as was breaking the larger applications down into smaller ones. This would make them more testable and would allow the client the track any in-application issues. In short, our client needed to adopt modern DevOps practices.    What We Did   The client had one massive application that, among other functions, primarily managed the inventory orders coming out and shipments to customers. There were roughly … Read more

Custom Application Streamlines Production and Reduces Costs

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food contacted Imaginet to complete and polish a custom application started by a few interns. The application was not as far along as they initially thought, and they needed support.   The App:  In summer 2023, the interns visited all the facilities to understand how they handle the production of their “meat mix” pet food. The facilities where the product is made are separate from the supplier locations. At this time, they were tracking products via a spreadsheet – a method prone to error. Per year, 10,000 tankers haul the meat mix product to and from the supplier locations, and this … Read more