Outlined below is some of the experience brought to Anapoly Ltd by its principals.
We are helping a mission community of nine Anglican parishes in Devon to improve the online services which support their work.
We support the development of community-energy schemes for the purchase of three solar farms in Devon, totaling 12.3 MW.
We advised other consultancies on risk management tools and their application
We sponsored a 3rd year student project at Plymouth University to build a proof of concept demonstrator of a long-endurance, remote camera linked to a website for detection of fly tipping. The project considered the balance of performance, endurance, cost and size.
We assisted a startup company move from product formulation to controlled batch production with documented proof of regulation compliance.
We supported Plymouth University’s Professional Entrepreneurial Mentoring Programme. This involved working with individual students over a six-month period to help them explore their business ideas and to guide them in making informed decisions about how best to develop the ideas. The pandemic constrained this effort, nonetheless our student mentees’ business ideas spanned the design and online sale of personal fitness equipment, the operation of a vegan food truck, and the application of composite materials technology to footbridges.
We supervise research projects carried out by MSc students at Warwick University.
Link to some of the topics researched by our MSc students
Electronic Document & Records Management. To provide a better quality of service, in 2006 Plymouth City Council set out an ambitious Information Management Strategy. This led to a five-year programme of work to implement electronic document and records management. An extensive, competitive procurement resulted in the selection of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services as the platform for this system. At the time this was cutting edge technology whose use involved substantial changes of organisational culture and working practices.
Link to briefing presentation on eDRMS given in 2008
Customer Alerts Register. Employees of Plymouth City Council are sometimes subjected to aggression or violence. In 2005 the Council had a policy for individual departments to alert employees about clients, customers or other members of the public who may pose a risk of violence to them. However the Council did not have a means for sharing this information across departments. A project was therefore set up to develop a corporate system able to share this information. The system became operational in 2006.
Links to the Concept of Operation and the Project Initiation Document.
Information Sharing Gateway. The need to enable ‘joined up working’ by health and social care teams required an innovative approach to the linking of their separate information systems. Plymouth City Council and Plymouth NHS Primary Care Trust collaborated on a project to demonstrate the feasibility of a system able to support inter-agency working and information sharing; this was called the Information Sharing Gateway. Alec Fearon was the project manager for this project, which was based at Plymouth Civic Centre and ran from 2004 until 2005.
Link to the project file
Electronic Health Record. In the period after the year 2000, a focus for innovation in health informatics was the concept of a lifelong record for a patient’s health and healthcare; this was termed an Electronic Health Record (EHR). The South & West Devon Health Community was commissioned by the NHS Information Authority to demonstrate the feasibility of such a system. Alec Fearon was the project manager of the resulting project, which was based at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and ran from 2001 until 2003. The project extended the core concept by identifying roles for the Electronic Health Record system as a ‘gatekeeper’ into the lifelong health record and as a ‘controller’ of the care pathway. Specific objectives were:
to synthesise an EHR from current operational systems;
to enable patient consent to the use of the health record;
to enforce role-based access to the health record by health care professionals;
to allow patients to interact with their health records; and
to provide services tailored to the patient’s care pathway.
Learning Clusters. South West Information Systems Ltd (SWIS) was formed in 1995 to supply Internet and website design services to clients in the UK South West. As the company grew it became clear that the core company team with its main sub-contractors and suppliers could be regarded as a ‘learning cluster,’ the management of which was a specific task calling for particular skills and requiring access to certain types of business information. By 2000 it was being acknowledged that, like many UK regions, the South West was suffering from skill shortages in key technologies which, if not tackled, might obstruct growth and dynamism in an economy seeking to recover from its past dependence on the defence sector and wishing to stimulate growth among small high technology companies. PROSPER – the Training & Enterprise Council for Devon & Cornwall – commissioned a study of the learning cluster concept. The study was carried out by Alec Fearon (managing director of SWIS) and Anthony Bainbridge.
Link to the final report: Learning Clusters for High Tech SMEs in the South West of England
Medical Information Resource. In 1998 the NHS-wide network was in its infancy and general practitioners were looking for innovative ways to bridge the gap until it could satisfy their need to move away from a dependence on entirely paper-based systems. The Medical Information Resource – an initiative of the Devon Local Medical Committees – was set up for that purpose.
Link to proposal document which describes the Medical Information Resource