Emergent Software

Emergent Software created two custom-built calculators that calculate crop insurance and dairy revenue protection rates for Compeer Financial’s insurance team. These calculators give agents a competitive advantage in the market as they are able to generate custom insurance quotes in a matter of minutes. Crop Insurance Decision Tool As the Emergent Software team began to create the custom app, they began to compile the various sources of the market, pricing, insurance, and geographic data needed to build the calculator. The complex nature of the data involved in this calculator required a lot of dedicated time and effort from the Compeer Financial and Emergent Software teams to ensure that data was being pulled, reported, and calculated properly. Also built into the tool is the option to generate a quote in a simple PDF format and even pulls in Salesforce customer data to populate various fields in the final quote.Dairy Revenue Protection Calculator The Emergent Software development team gathered a list of industry- and- company-specific insurance information, such as location, class ratio, insurance type, and more to build the calculator and specific fields around information that mattered most to insurance officers and farmers. Next, the Emergent Software team developed a Microsoft Azure WebJob function that takes publicly available dairy market data, imports it into a data warehouse, and then pre-processes it to make the calculations faster, which uses a Monte Carlo statistical data model to create simulations and projected pricing. All data is stored in an Azure SQL database, which requires a robust level of function for blob storage and stored procedures needed to do the required DRP calculations.

Electromed contacted Emergent Software to integrate their existing electronic business management system – Brightree – with their enterprise CRM – Microsoft Dynamics. Electromed had an asynchronous solution in place when the project discovery began. They were fighting data sync, quality and consistency issues, creating more work and drawn-out processes. The company needed a way to prevent growing data problems, as well as establish a way to link multiple records for one clinic location. While the technology platforms were in place, Emergent needed to establish processes to allow internal users to better manage data. This 6-month project involved building a cloud-based service that establishes a unique key for records to connect and merge into reliable, usable clinic data, resulting in improved data integrity. The service now informs users that a close clinic match was found and allows them to accept or create a new record for that location. This improved the data synch process significantly, cuts down on bad data flowing into Microsoft Dynamics, and has enabled key team members at Electromed to focus on higher-value work, rather than manually correcting data errors.  Emergent Software’s flexible delivery process ended up being a key factor to the success of this project. Through early discovery activities, where our team learns about the project’s goals and prepare a high-level design and plan for delivering the solution, we uncovered configuration challenges and additional data problems neither team could have expected prior to working together. These issues needed to be addressed, so the teams decided to add this additional work to the project while it was in flight. Both parties had entered the project knowing that uncovering system and business rule complexity are typical parts of the software development process, and the trust built between them along the way allowed the teams to adapt and overcome the various challenges faced throughout the project.

A failed website development project with another local web development company left Kalahari’s digital marketing team searching for a new development partner during one of their busiest times of the year. Luckily, they found Emergent Software ready to pick up the pieces and carry the project through to completion with the level of urgency the situation required. The development activity of their Umbraco CMS website was transitioned to Emergent in days, and the project was quickly completed within a month from the transition. A critical area of focus for the Kalahari team regarding their website centered around crisis management and disaster recovery. The website experienced more traffic than they ever have before and they needed their site to continue to perform well under an increase in users.Emergent Software and Kalahari have worked together to help scale Kalahari’s servers to handle the increased amount of traffic to the site without diminishing a user’s experience, all while making sure the increase in hosting costs stays within the team’s budget. Our team put together a plan of action to adjust server infrastructure (which is hosted on Microsoft Azure) to ensure that the site can handle increased amounts of traffic. Our team has also helped Kalahari build a disaster recovery plan in the event that their site experiences an outage. This plan will help the team to minimize loss of their data and to continue providing site visitors with the information they need.In addition to disaster recovery planning and prevention, Emergent Software has helped Kalahari pursue a number of initiatives all related to improving a user’s experience on the site. A few highlights include:Ensuring compliance with GDPR privacy lawsEnhancing the site’s mobile experienceIncreasing site accessibility on a variety of platformsAdding features to translate the entire website into multiple languagesEnhanced spam filtering

After years of Kalahari and Emergent working together to continuously enhance their current Umbraco website, Kalahari decided it was time for a refresh. They approached their trusted Emergent team to help them build a site that met three key business goals:Provide a cohesive user experience (UX)Have a fresh new look that reflects their updated brandReliable and able to scale to major spikes in trafficWith their web development partner firmly in place, the next big question was which Content Management System (CMS) fit their business goals best. With Emergent’s experience across numerous CMS’s, they turned to our team of experts to guide them in this decision. The team considered all CMS options, and eventually determined that the latest version of Umbraco fit their unique needs best. Some of the Umbraco features that appealed to Kalahari included: a better multi-lingual editing experience, the introduction of a new block editor, and the re-platform to .net core/5+ (Microsoft’s latest development framework), allowing Kalahari to future-proof their system and provide better performance on the site. With these powerful new features, coupled with its open-source (free) price tag, Umbraco was a clear winner.Kalahari challenged us to try to beat their Spring Break booking rush, which meant the Emergent Software team had just over three months to complete development of the new website. Our team proved up to the challenge, and the result is a beautiful website that will allow Kalahari to meet their goal: striving for an interconnected user experience across the entirety of their digital footprint - Emergent Software is proud to partner with them to make that happen!Emergent Software continues to work with the Kalahari team to improve their guests’ online experience on an on-going basis.