“I am impressed with the team members at Mitrais. They have advanced technology expertise and communicate fluently in English. The Mitrais team excelled in responding to technical and design challenges while incorporating guidance and feedback consistently well. Their engagement with the Ramesys Internal team was awesome. I have no hesitation in both recommending them and in continuing to work with them on our current and future projects.”

Sonya Preece, Product Technical Manager

Ramesys Global Pty Ltd, Australia

The 1990s and early 2000s was a challenging time for the mining industry, and in that environment marginal mining operations were crying out for innovative tools. This was the genesis of Ramesys Global, formed with the sole purpose of creating smarter ways to help these ventures to stay in business. Whether it be in the field of Finance and Operations, Maintenance or Business Intelligence, Ramesys has evolved into a market leading developer of smart tools yielding shorter budgeting cycles, quicker month-end turnaround, greatly reduced effort in month end reporting and variance analysis, less errors and greater confidence in reported numbers. A win-win for the whole organisation.

The Background

In the spirit of continuous improvement that is the hallmark of Ramesys Global, the team led by Sonya Preece (Product Technical Manager) determined that it was time to further enhance their solution set by moving from their original client-server architecture to a web-based solution. This was seen as a natural evolution that would deliver massive benefits for not only the established user base and prospective clients, but also in terms of streamlining the ongoing support and enhancement of the product set.

The Challenge

As Sonya said, “We were looking to redevelop our windows-forms application modules as web applications and lacked the skillset internally to achieve that outcome. Looking to hire a permanent web developer/analyst programmer locally was proving difficult”. Adding to the challenge, Ramesys Global hoped to achieve this evolution without requiring any major changes to the data layer where much of the business process was housed.

The Solution

Sonya identified Mitrais as a potential partner in this redevelopment. “For not much more that the cost of a relatively inexperienced local resource, Mitrais suggested a team consisting of a .2 Tech Evangelist, .5 Designer and 1 Analyst/Programmer. This appealed to me immediately as an option worth pursuing and our initial engagement was a small proof of concept project” she says.

Initially looking at the React.js framework using the SyncFusion library as a basis for the rewrite, there was an issue. While React.js/SyncFusion was a full featured stack, it became apparent that it required the client to download relatively large pieces of data, resulting in slightly disappointing performance in this use case.

Mitrais was able to provide an alternative. “The Mitrais team made technical recommendations for the application architecture based on real and extensive experience and have the background to investigate and resolve potential problems as they arise very quickly” Sonya says. “The opportunity to access the advanced skillset of the evangelist and designer has added incredible value and efficiency as we have been able to leverage their expertise to both reduce project risk and achieve a better result. As a small company we would not have been able to hire (or find or afford) the equivalent resources locally”.

Moving to the Next.js framework addressed the performance issues by pre-rendering pages for quick client download, and asynchronously reloading client-side scripts as needed. The results of the Proof or Concept were so successful that Sonya was delighted. “This quickly progressed to a bigger project, the web redevelopment of our Cost Modeller module” she says.

“From the beginning the Mitrais team have meshed seamlessly with our internal Ramesys team. They take great care to incorporate feedback and are also proactive in making suggestions regarding improvements. The English language skills of the Mitrais team members are also excellent. The Agile approach they have used to manage the project has worked well.

I plan to be working with Mitrais ongoing into the future. I have confidence and trust in the team and the product they are producing for us. Mitrais management are also very flexible and accommodating.  I have no hesitation in recommending Mitrais (and have to a couple of peers already).”