The customer

Solagen is a global market leader development, manufacture and supply of a wide range of environmentally-friendly solar powered, LED illuminated products, for use on the highways.

The company provides its various products to many local authority departments, highway contractors, schools and bus operators globally. 

The challenge

The vision for highly complex, solar powered signs was not just to be a driver information system but to become a powerful data collection tool which could be controlled remotely.

Helastel was tasked with creating a data collection facility over the GSM network that would gather data from each individual sign. The data would then be analysed, processed and presented online to each individual client of Solagen.

Our expertise

Helastel collaborated with Solagen’s sign development department to plan and develop the entire system. We consulted and managed business wide, global roll-out, including employee support and initial training. A UK team of people was on hand to ensure the success of the project – and the security of Solagen’s investment.

Helastel provided full solution, including the hardware and the data centre facilities to deal with the large volumes of data, its processing and analysis.

Our experts know all the essential success factors for delivering large scale, distributed data collection platform. This is why the emphasis was on quality during project planning and execution – and on a high level of user acceptance.

Our solution

Design and development

The task was highly complex due to the number of individual hardware and software systems involved. The design of the solution included facilities for reading data from low-power embedded components, performing errors checking before and after GSM transport, delivering data over the GSM network in the most cost efficient and timely way and then processing the data and reporting on it online.

Implementation

Helastel carefully prepared the requirements, specification and the development plan. The software development began in close consultancy with the client. The software was called Sentient. Sentient was initially rolled out in the UK according to a carefully designed site-by-site roll out plan. Helastel tested the software in a pre-implementation procedure before every roll-out.

Training

At the same time as the rollout, IT managers, power users (functional admins) and users received intensive training at every site. During the entire roll-out phase, Helastel provided support for Sentient users and administrators designed especially for the project.

Technical Background

Helastel used combination of data transports MySQL databases and a sophisticated online delivery network designed specifically for the project.

We collaborated with Solagen’s engineers to design protocols for data extraction from the hardware and delivery of this data to file exchange platform.