How Ignition Saves Time Money & Lives for Medical Charity

Speakers

Chris Taylor

Managing Director

BIJC Ltd

See firsthand how UK charity SERV Kent uses Ignition to create an AWS cloud-based volunteer management system to revolutionize its medical transport operations. Driven by Ignition Perspective, this application replaces archaic manual processes with intuitive interfaces featuring real-time geolocation data transfers, GDPR-compliant security, and optimized volunteer, vehicle, and product management. Hear Chris Taylor discuss the project’s challenges, solutions, progression,  and future enhancements and breakthroughs that will bolster SERV Kent's mission-critical endeavors.

Transcript: 

00:02
Bobby McKenzie: All right, welcome. Hello, my name is Bobby McKenzie. I'm the Senior Training Manager here at Inductive Automation. Maybe step away a little bit. So welcome to today's session. This is "How Ignition Saves Time, Money, and Lives for Medical Charity." I'll be your moderator today. To start things off, I'd like to introduce our speaker here. This is Chris Taylor. He's the Managing Director at BIJC Limited. He has extensive experience in automated control systems with the power industry. And since 2011, he's been a strong advocate of Ignition software. Personally, he's held senior roles in emergency power systems, critical power systems for global banking, energy and data centers. And he founded BIJC Limited in 2014 to develop Ignition SCADA solutions, and has since expanded into MES and edge-driven systems for various industries. Chris has been a member of the Institution of Power Engineers since 1997, and the Institution of Engineering and Technology since 2005. All-around great guy.

01:10
Chris Taylor: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. As Bobby said, my name's Chris Taylor, and this is just a talk about BIJC and a charity that we support. That's me. So the charity that we support is called SERV Kent. It's an emergency courier charity based in the southeast of the UK. What we do basically is we are couriers and we transfer blood, blood products, milk, that's human milk, medication, samples, anything really that will go in a car or on a motorcycle. And we transport it between hospitals and hospices and blood banks, patients' homes, anywhere, really. And the reason we do that is because out of hours the only alternative is an ambulance or a police car, something like that, an emergency vehicle. And that takes a very vital resource out of action.

02:23
Chris Taylor: We also supply blood to our local air ambulances, either at their base or on scene. And typically that's what I do. The services are free and it saves hospitals funds for patient care. At the moment, we have 200 volunteers. They cover their own expenses, and we have typically about 6,000 calls a year. SERV Kent is recognized by major hospitals as an essential service for saving lives. Personally, I hold advanced motorcycle and roadcraft qualifications, and for me, volunteering for the charity is a great excuse to go for a ride on my bike.

03:12
Chris Taylor: Okay, so why SERV and BIJC? So we're a Premier Integrator, and when Ignition 8.0 was released, 8.0.0, we really needed a a project to learn Perspective on. Now Inductive University is great, and all of our new starters go through the university, but we're a great believer in having real-life challenges to learn from. And so we decided that as a business, we would support SERV Kent by creating a project or a set of projects that they could use in their day-to-day operations. So they had a few challenges. Before we had the Ignition projects everything was paper based. Everything in the charity was paper based, but it was in all different locations. So that was a challenge. Product deliveries were done with a little booklet with three different colors, bits of paper, a pink, a blue, and a white. And when you collected, you have to give a white one out, when you delivered, you have to give a blue one out, and there were 25 of those in each book, which is fine except for some volunteers might only do 25 runs in six months.

04:39
Chris Taylor: And so we would only get that information in six months. And so our data collection was really, really poor. The slips were illegible, they'd get lost, and so we'd have huge gaps in the data. So that was our really, that was one of the first things that we wanted to sort out. Secondly, was a rota system. With 200 volunteers, you need to know who's available when, where, and what they can do. And so we wanted to build a self-service rota and also for volunteers to be able to see when they could volunteer. Volunteer management with 200 volunteers, we need to know their addresses, their phone numbers, what their qualifications are, all of the things that you need to manage. This was already done, but it was a filing cabinet. It was in one location, and if more than one of the committee wanted to access it, there were security issues, GDPR issues, all sorts of things that we needed to get right.

05:47
Chris Taylor: Fleet management, we have a number of cars, and we have a number of motorcycles that are owned by the charity. So we need to know where they are, who's got them, who's allowed to ride them or drive them. Do they need servicing? Do they need insuring? Do they need tires? What's their mileage? All of those things. And finally, event management. We needed a way to let our members know when we are having events for fundraising, when we were having events for awareness, if there were social events, we do do some social events. So you can understand that there was... These are just five of the basic things. There's an awful lot more, but you can understand that, if we could have a single system that allowed us to do this it would be fantastic. So this is what we decided to build. And we started in, the first bit went live in 2019, in September 2019, so pretty much five years ago.

06:53
Chris Taylor: So the first thing we built was the rota system. So this allowed members just to click on where they want to volunteer. Again, with most things, it looks very simple, but in the background, extremely difficult because different members have different qualifications. They operate in different areas. Some members are controllers, some members are riders, some members are drivers, some members are both. Some members can do the air ambulance, lots of things. So for Perspective, we were very used to building in Vision. So this was our first Perspective project, and we tried to transfer our Vision skills to Perspective, and we very quickly learned that wasn't gonna work. And so we had to learn a bit of web dev stuff. And so for example, this rota, when we first built it, we built labels and we put icons with the labels, and then that was a view.

08:03
Chris Taylor: So if you look at this page, for example, we've probably got 20 views on this page, just on that two rota slots. Sounds fine. But in the initial versions of Perspective, we found that the icon library was per view, so each, sorry, per, yeah, per view. So when you put an icon in a view, it downloaded the entire library. Well, if we put an entire month on the screen, we could be downloading the icon library 600 times, and it kind of slowed things down. So first of all, we learned how to build really small icon libraries, bespoke icon libraries, but Inductive Automation as they are, saw that this was a problem. And I think by 8.1, it was an icon per or icon library per page. So they've sorted that out. But it was a pain point and it's, when you start with a new system, you have to learn these things. But now, so this is what it looks like these days. It looks exactly the same to the members, but the way it works is completely different.

09:25
Chris Taylor: For example we learned about binding refresh. And that's a game changer for this because initially when someone clicked on one of the icons to put their name in, it would refresh the entire data set. But now, well, within a few weeks of us deploying this, we worked out that you could use the binding refresh and just change the users or the label that we were dealing with. And it was a game changer because the user experience, and you've got to remember that the users that I'm talking about, they're not in a factory. They are just normal members of the public who volunteer. They don't understand what's going on in the background. And so their user experience is really important. And this project really helped us hone user experience.

10:27
Chris Taylor: So the next thing that we really needed to work on was collection, delivery, and transfer. Again, before I spoke about the booklets. And so we developed a smaller project that was more mobile friendly. And what we wanted to do was to be able to collect the data. And one of the important things is we needed to know who, when, where, and what. They were the four things that we needed to capture. And with location services, Ignition allowed us to do that really, really simply, so we could get the location, when they hit the collection button, we asked them, what are you collecting? And that could be multiple products. And then they would just set their destination and hit the collect button, and that would create an entry into the database. And then when they delivered, they just, if they were in the right location, it would say, "Oh, it looks like you're there." Push the button. And it was delivered.

11:31
Chris Taylor: And what that meant was, whereas before we were collecting data every six months, if at all, we were collecting data in real time. And it was a huge difference to our stakeholders because they were able to say, "Okay, where's my product?" And we allowed our customers or our stakeholders at the hospitals to connect into the system and actually see where things were. And, huge, huge difference. One of the things I want to talk about with this though, is transfer. We found out in the first year that we were losing a little bit of data when we transferred. So to stop volunteers from having to travel too far from home, the area that we cover is the whole of the southeast of England. You can easily be 200 miles away from home at times. And so to stop people from traveling too far from home, we operate a relay system. So they collect from hospital A and they'd go to a meeting point, swap it over, go to hospital B, which is fine. But in the first iteration of this, they had to end the delivery and then start a new delivery. So we wanted a method to transfer from one phone or one mobile to the next mobile. And what that meant was that we had to figure out a way of opening or opening a pop-up on one session from a different session.

13:07
Chris Taylor: And it's a powerful thing once you get the hang of it. But again, not straightforward. So these are a few tables. This is probably about 20% of the tables that were involved in a delivery transfer. But, again, it's never as simple as you think it is, because when we collect products, we are not generally collecting one product. We might be collecting three products, and when we transfer them, the destinations, they're all collected from hospital A, but then they're transferred and then they've gotta go to hospital B, C, and D. So we have to be able to track all of that in the transfer. So the process for this is, the first thing that we have to do is we have to find out what is the session that... What sessions are available, who is logged on to a Perspective session. So we use system tool, get session info, and that gives us all of the sessions. We can then filter that for the project that we're interested in. And then from that we can use the location data for each session and find out how many people or what people are within about 500 meters of the initiating session.

14:31
Chris Taylor: From that, we can get the ID of each user, and from that, we can get there. We can get a photograph of them, because with 200 volunteers, they don't know everybody. And so it's much easier if you've got a photograph so they can see who they wanna transfer to 'cause they're usually standing right in front of them. And they poke them in the face and that initiates a session-to-session message. We don't actually need a big payload in that message. We just need the run log ID number. And then the recipient receives a pop-up. They just click, I'm gonna accept that. And the transfer is complete. What we do is, it's just a... So this is, sorry, I'm going ahead of myself. So they get a transfer request, they click on that. And from there we, sorry... We don't transfer much data, but what it does, it initiates a series of name queries to end one run, start a new run. But importantly, link the two runs together, both from the recipient and from the initiator. And in the four years that that's been running, we've done 4,500 transfers, and we have lost zero bits of data. So we are very, very pleased with that. I do have, I don't have. I was gonna show you a video of the transfer happening.

16:19
Chris Taylor: It's, I think, it's been made into a still. But anyway, so what the video shows was, you can see there is a "transfer to" button. You press that button and you poke the person, and it really, it transfers in three, four seconds. And no loss of data. If anyone's really interested, I can show you on my phone. So the other thing that we developed was a calendar. And you can imagine running a charity that delivers things. We needed to schedule quite a few things. And there is no calendar option in Perspective. So we built our own. I'm very fortunate in the business that I have people who can build modules for us. And we wanted a calendar that was easy to use. And so we implemented a copy of a FullCalendar.io as a component. And it has everything that you would expect. Outlook, or Google Calendar to have. You can click on it, you can create events, you can create reoccurring events, all of the things that you would expect a calendar to have. We use it, so for each member, they think they have their own calendar. It's just a data set. Each time they open their calendar, we search for everything that's relevant to that particular member and display it on their calendar. If I go back, you can see, that has like fundraising and a talk to people. There'll be social events there, all sorts of things. It's very, very useful for planning.

18:25
Chris Taylor: We've had a look at that. Oh yes, we can export any events as an iCal object, which is very useful. The other thing that we really, really need to do is mileage tracking. It's something that we were never able to do before. And for our stakeholders, it's vitally important for them to know what we are doing. And so they can calculate their savings. We have around about 50 named locations dotted around the southeast with four major trauma centers. And again it's quite complicated for us to calculate the mileage and the time it takes because each member is started from a different location. They're generally starting from home. And then they're going to hospital A, hospital B, hospital C, and then back home. That's a simple run. We can gather the data from the run log that they fill in. But of course, if you just look at that data, it looks like they're traveling from hospital A to hospital B, hospital A to hospital C, hospital A to hospital D, and that's not the journey they're taking they're going A, B, C, D. So we've got some rather complex scripts that go through that look at each, each entry in chronological order, see if they're close to each other in time.

19:58
Chris Taylor: So when they were started and then tries to work out a route. And it works about 95% of the time, we get it right. It's extremely tricky. Once we've done it, we stick it through the Google API. So we have to, each of the run components, we have to get the longitude and latitude. We stick that into the API, and that gives us a distance and a time. And then we have to build the run up again that way. We end up with a huge dictionary of longitudes and latitudes and times. And that's a script that runs once a day for every journey. But as I said, we don't always get it right. So we have a manual check that members can use to work out their locations. They can enter everything in manually and just check. And if we're wrong, they let us know, but it also gives us information to just refine our scripting. That's a little bit of scripting, which doesn't mean much, but it's something to stick up there. I could talk for a very long time, but I was trying to find things that were of interest, because a lot of what Ignition is doing for SERV Kent is just quite mundane. A database entry or a front end of a database, but it makes such a difference.

21:33
Chris Taylor: A couple of photographs. This is, that's Mr. Shepherd there with his bike and my bike. This was about a month ago, quite a rural area. We were called here because some pedestrians thought it'd be a good idea to cross that road. That's a 70-mile-an-hour road and they both got hit by a lorry. Two air ambulances in attendance. This is just as the second ambulance had taken off. And Gary brought blood from one hospital, I brought blood from another hospital. So that's the kind of thing that we do. So this is not, we did quite a lot of mundane things but when you've been with the charity a long time and you've got a bit of a few qualifications, that's the sort of thing that we do. And Ignition makes this work because we know who's available, when they're available, and where they are. So this was in the early evening, so we were both out of work, but the controller knew we were both free, knew where the vehicles were, and knew where the closest hospitals for us were, and were able to contact the hospitals, get the blood prepared, and we were on scene within, I don't know, 35 minutes of being called. So pretty good. There's our shiny motorbikes, they were clean there. If anyone's interested, they're a pair of Yamaha FJRs, police spec motorcycles with emergency equipment and lights and sirens, that sort of thing. And go-faster stripes, we like those.

23:26
Chris Taylor: Just a few bits of information here. So this is another thing that Ignition does for us. We have an infographic. I just put a start date and an end date in it, and it calculates this for me, which takes it about three seconds to do that. So since we've been using Ignition, we've done over 30,000 runs. We've traveled over two million miles, and we've volunteered for 90,000 hours. There's two things I wanna say as well. We benefit from the nonprofit credits for, that AWS give us, for a small fee, we get $1,000 of credits, which just about covers our hosting in AWS. But more importantly, Inductive Automation last year started the Community Impact Program. I think we were one of the first people to sign up for that. And now I don't have to worry about the cost of upgrades. Fantastic. So that's been a huge help for us. That's it. Anybody got any questions?

24:38
Audience Member 1: You were the first. You were the first.

24:39
Chris Taylor: Was I the first?

24:43
Audience Member 2: Howdy. First off, it's really neat for you to do something impactful or something that we all do largely for customers that make millions and billions of dollars 'cause you're actually making people's lives better or longer. Secondly, how did you acquire the data for the the people and the equipment, like, what means did you get the GPS location?

25:07
Chris Taylor: So GPS location comes from their own devices. So they use their own cell phones, mobile phones, and Ignition even just as a web browser, 'cause we don't typically use the app because it's a little bit complicated for members of the public to use. So it's just a web page. But from that web page, we can still pull. We just tell them to turn location services on, and we can pull that through. Do have a bit of a problem with Androids now and again, but we can get that information through. As far as the product that they're picking up, when they select a collection, it brings a pop-up with a whole list of things that it possibly could be. And they can select that.

25:57
Chris Taylor: In the near future, we're gonna have to do barcode reading for blood so that it's got more traceability. And I'm really looking forward to 8.3 for offline integration because that is a challenge that we have if a member is somewhere where there's no cell phone coverage they have to do it manually when they've got coverage. Because, although I've been describing collection and delivery is fairly automatic, they forget. So if they go to deliver something, they go, "Oh, I forgot to collect it on the app." They can enter it in manually. They can go to a manual mode and enter it in. Yeah. So for GPS location, they just enable GPS services and for... They can select what they're collecting. But importantly, we only track people when they're using the app. That was something we had to make very clear to them because we did have a bit of pushback 'cause they thought, "Oh, you're gonna know if I'm speeding, you're gonna know what route I've taken." So we only, basically, it's only when they're interacting with the app that we know where they are.

27:14
Bobby McKenzie: I actually had a question for you. So you mentioned at the very... Whoa. Let me stand over here.

27:22
Chris Taylor: Probably.

27:23
Bobby McKenzie: So you mentioned that you use AWS, at the end there. How do you use AWS with this app?

27:28
Chris Taylor: It's very simple really. We used to have a, we've got an instance in EC2, just a very small, I think it's a T3 now, we had to upgrade. T3, very small instance and we have a MariaDB instance as well. We just connect the two together. AWS makes it really, really easy to do. I think the most tricky thing is the certificates, getting the security certificates in. But once you work that out, it's very straightforward. I mean AWS do make it really simple to do simple installs like this. It's very straightforward. And we did this in 2019 when things weren't quite so easy, but the most tricky thing was setting security. Oh, and the DNS, the DNS wasn't quite so straightforward, but this has a separate URL just for this. But our members don't really see that because the just log on and they can log into the main site, hit run, and it takes them directly to the other site. So yes, but AWS has been great. Our uptime is phenomenal.

28:42
Chris Taylor: I mean, I can't remember... One time I did an update to Ignition and it failed. That caused me a little bit of grief. But that was a connectivity issue, that wasn't Ignition's fault. So that was the only time we were down for about 30 minutes. Other than that, I don't recall any downtime. Very good. Yeah, and we have to have it running all the time, 'cause we run a 24-hour operation. And we don't have many users on there. I think the most I've seen is about 35 people on it. But that's because people are volunteering in rotas. Yes, sir.

29:27
Audience Member 3: Have you shared to other parts of England?

29:34
Chris Taylor: So yes, they know about it and they've seen it. The thing is there, so there is a group called NABB, which is the National Association of Blood Bikes, and there are other groups, but we all operate differently. There's no single... We don't operate in the same way. We have different rules. And then there's GDPR. Everybody would have to be a member of everybody else's group for us to share information. We did look at rolling this out as a project that they could use independently, but they don't have the skill set to manage it. And I don't really want to be managing 20 different versions of this. We did look at going nationally, but again, they operate differently, so it's difficult to do. One day, perhaps.

30:47
Bobby McKenzie: Any other questions? Well, I do have one very important question for you. Are you guys gonna win the Build-a-Thon?

30:55
Chris Taylor: Are we gonna win the Build-a-Thon? So I have three of my, I say guys, three of, two guys and a girl who are currently at headquarters working very hard. Are we gonna win it? I don't know if we'll win it, but we'll have the most fun.

31:14
Bobby McKenzie: There we go, love it.

31:16
Chris Taylor: Yeah. We've made sure that we're gonna enjoy it and there's a few jokes there, so.

31:21
Bobby McKenzie: Excellent. All right. If there are no other questions, then we can end there. Thank you very much, Chris.

31:28
Chris Taylor: Thank you, you're welcome.

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