Services

Fern Information Systems Limited provides the following services:

Effective Software Development
Independent review of the current software development cycle/process employed in an individual project or an entire organisation.

Report covering strengths and weaknesses and remedial advice prioritized to maximise return on investment (ROI).

Support, Refactoring and Development
Provision of support, refactoring and additional development for existing software information systems. Disillusionment with your existing software support services and/or the original software system supplier is a common problem.

Bespoke Software Development
Provision of bespoke software development, for individual components and/or complete systems.

IT Project Management
As always prevention is better than the cure but whatever you do if an IT project is beginning to drift its far better to deal with it sooner rather than later.

We provide:


  • Independent project review, a rapid and intense review of the project;

  • An assessment of current state problems and advisory remedial action;

  • Provision of interim IT project management, if required;

Healthcare

Fern has a long-term relationship with SafeScript Ltd.

SafeScript integrate information on drugs, such as all the ingredients that go to make up a given product (drug), the recommended dosages, the indications and contraindications for the various ingredients, etc. are held in association with the standardised medical codes that are utilised by healthcare systems all over the world.
The information is acquired from many sources and the resulting database in various forms is integrated into several primary and secondary healthcare systems.

Standalone Applications
Fern have a detailed knowledge of the drug database and have produced several standalone applications and intranet sites that deploy it, both on the PC and Pocket PC (PDA) platforms.

This involves significant restructuring and compression of the standard relational database to allow it to be incorporated in such products and to provide adequate performance on the more portable hardware platforms.

Conversion APIs
Fern have extensive experience in developing conversion API's to convert and access SafeScript's drug database to match the format of other providers.

Education
Examination Processing Systems
Fern has been involved with the development of larger scale Examination Processing Systems for the equivalent of GCSE and O level examinations and the provision of system support and enhancement.

National Curriculum
Fern has developed, implemented and supported several systems (accredited by the Department of Education) to support the acquisition and reporting of assessment data for the National Curriculum Baseline and Key Stage 1 assessments. The system provided both the statutory and bespoke reports for subsequent analysis.

Data may be acquired via manual entry and/or Optical Mark Reader (OMR) sheets. It is stored in a database and once fully validated the data is analysed and a large number of reports generated for the benefit of the individual schools and Local Education Authorities.

Financial System Integration
Fern has experience of many of the protocols, systems and deal types used within the Financial Markets, in particular that of the Foreign Exchange market.

For instance we are familiar with the capabilities and output protocols of the following Reuters Foreign Exchange trading platforms: Dealing 2000, Dealing 3000 and Reuters Dealing Link.

We have developed bespoke software applications to acquire deal data via the Reuters TOF serial feed, the web services provided by several multi-bank portals and the FIX protocol and then converted and interfaced the feed to other financial systems.

Reliability and resilience of the applications is considered crucial in this market due to the cost of any downtime due to lost trading opportunity and the risk of the market moving against the trader's position.

Transient Monitoring
Fern has been involved in developing, maintaining and supporting transient monitoring systems for both seismic events and the monitoring and investigation of sporadic and unwanted vibration in large-scale chemical reactors.

Seismic Event Monitoring
Involved porting an existing seismic monitoring system initially developed for the IBM AT DOS platform to a 32-bit Windows platform and subsequent enhancement to run on a portable PC with timing and position information being acquired via a GPS receiver. The system is intended to run for prolonged periods in the field in very isolated terrain. Due to limited data storage capacity, the system is designed to only record significant seismic events and discard general background noise.

Plant Vibration Monitoring
Involved the development of a transient monitoring system to monitor large-scale chemical reactors for unexplained sporadic vibrations that threatened the integrity of the reactor. Data was collected at source from a number of vibration sensors, analysed and filtered to reduce the bandwidth required and periodically uploaded to a remote machine for more detailed analysis in conjunction with information on the reactor inputs.

Platforms and Technologies

Operating systems platforms supported:
Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Linux on the Win/Intel hardware platform;

Microsoft Windows CE on the Pocket PC PDA platform;

Relational database platforms supported:

  • Microsoft Access

  • Microsoft SQL Server

  • Oracle

  • MySQL

    Development languages/methodologies supported:

  • C

  • C++

  • Delphi

  • Visual Basic

  • C#

  • Java

  • XML

  • XSLT

  • Ruby/Rails

  • SQL

  • UML

  • MDA

  • SOA

    Web server platforms supported:

  • Microsoft Internet Information Server

  • Apache

Copyright © 2006 Fern Information Systems Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Last Updated - 5th August 2006