Hawcroft is a risk management advisory consultancy specialising in the mining industry, which is trusted for its transparent, detailed risk reports. Multi-million dollar insurance renewals hinge on Hawcroft’s assessment of each site’s risks and controls, with their recommendations ultimately improving site safety, ensuring accurate insurance coverage is obtained, and key assets (like railways, bridges, townships and equipment) are preserved.
Hawcroft sets the industry standard in risk reporting, producing detailed and comprehensive annual reports for clients, each containing hundreds of pages of risk observations, recommendations and insights. However, their document-based PDF reports restricted their ability to share the rich media content they collected at each site, including hundreds of high-quality images and videos, which limited Hawcroft’s ability to provide detailed context in the reports.
As the report was an annual deliverable, the positive steps sites took in response to Hawcroft’s recommendations often weren’t made visible until the following reporting cycle. Furthermore, the static and compressed PDF format made it difficult for readers to efficiently find the information they were seeking. Users had expressed frustration when viewing images and diagrams in the existing PDF reports, as they were heavily compressed to keep the overall file size of the report manageable.
Hawcroft recognized the need for a customised, modern, scalable, and feature-rich digital reporting portal that could significantly enhance the value of their risk reporting offering to support the insurance renewal process.
We estimate that our current PDF reports allowed us to share only about 5% of the digital content we capture at each site, limiting the insights we can provide. With the Digital Reporting Portal, we can now share a much broader set of data and content giving our clients a far deeper understanding of their risks and controls.
Creating a self-managed product
To revolutionise their reporting capabilities, Hawcroft turned to Thoughtworks for our expertise in custom software development. They envisioned a digital portal that could seamlessly share, visualise, and update risk profiles beyond the traditional PDF reports they were working with.
To deliver on Hawcroft’s vision, we created a cross-functional team, where product, design and engineering worked together to bring the idea to life.
The team followed a thin-slice delivery approach, aiming to deliver working, testable slices of the product as early as possible. This put real software into the hands of users quickly, and ensured constant validation of the value was baked into the delivery process.
The product itself was to be self-managed and integrate with Hawcroft’s existing systems, enabling the Hawcroft team to take ownership of the scalable digital reporting portal.
We’re now stepping into a realm where data, visuals, and Hawcroft insights come together to give you a comprehensive understanding of each operation, its risks and controls.
Improved insights and user experience
In collaboration with Hawcroft, we transformed the sharing, visualization, and updating capability of Hawcroft’s reports. The custom product that was created integrates with Hawcroft’s existing report writing and risk management tool, using a content management system to host Hawcroft’s rich media content.
The team followed Material UI principles together with the Hawcroft brand guidelines to create an intuitive user interface. Wherever possible, out-of-the-box components were used as simple, reusable building blocks – creating consistency across screens and features, and allowing the team to iterate quickly and implement changes with ease.
This system has created significant sharing, usability and efficiency improvements, including:
- Access to reports anywhere, anytime
- Hosting rich multimedia content
- Intuitive search capabilities
- Interactive table of contents to simplify navigation
- Ability to compare reports across years
- The ability to update and respond to recommendations year-round
The ability to host rich multimedia content, coupled with an intuitive interface, has significantly improved the user experience. Our clients now have a deeper, more immersive understanding of the risks and controls.
Ensuring data safety
Hawcroft’s PDF reports posed challenges in managing unauthorized access and distribution. To address this, we developed a product with access control based on individual user clearance and multi-factor authentication. This ensures that only authorized users can access specific information on the system.
Hawcroft’s clients gain confidence knowing that their data is secure and access is managed through invitation-only protocols.
Knowing that our data is secure with access-control measures and multi-factor authentication gives us and our clients peace of mind. Thoughtworks have built a robust system that ensures only authorised users can access our sensitive information, which is crucial for our business.
Outcome
The digital reporting portal significantly enhanced the value of Hawcroft’s offering, helping them attract more clients and secure more extensive engagements. With Hawcroft’s team able to manage the product internally, the first two phases of the project have been a resounding success.
The positive results have led to further opportunities for us to collaborate with Hawcroft on another custom software development initiative so that they can continue to use technology to innovate and modernize their business.
There is certainly a lot of interest in the Digital Reporting Portal, and in one case it may be the driver for increasing one client from 1 site to 11 sites per year.
