Reading time 4 min

Shari Paret

For ACA, it’s important to take our responsibility as a company and to handle our planet in a sustainable way. As an organization, there are a few things we can do to help reduce the ecological footprint. One of these things is green mobility by means of an electric fleet. Belgium is currently in the middle of the transition from an ICE fleet to an EV fleet. The Belgian government recently took the decision to only continue tax benefits for emission-free company cars by 2026. As a result, many organizations will have to go through a transition to an electric fleet in a short period of time. This means that fleets will evolve from a majority of internal combustion engine (ICE) fossil fuel vehicles to a fleet with only electric vehicles (EV). At ACA, we’re glad we’ve started this project a long time ago already and will achieve this goal by 2025! We see our place in the world as one in which we inspire and accelerate sustainable growth worldwide by empowering people through innovation, technology and knowledge. A completely electric fleet, too, helps in achieving this goal and keeping our environmental impact as limited as possible. We already started doing this 10 years ago by introducing our employees to electric vehicles. Since then, all our colleagues have been able to book an electric car for a week or during the weekend. Today, so many years later, this initiative helped us to electrify our fleet very quickly. After all, many colleagues had already been convinced to go fully electric thanks to their positive experiences in these past years. An ambitious goal and motivated colleagues We’re extremely proud that this big transition is going very smoothly for us. It took a considerable amount of time for a wide range of electric cars to appear on the market. Nevertheless, in 2021, we have enough options available from which most employees will find a car that fits their needs. We know this because our employees are still completely free to choose between an ICE or an EV, but 36 of the 43 cars ordered this year are already fully electric. It appears that more and more people, clearly including our own colleagues, are thinking of an electric vehicle. We – and the planet – are very happy about that! A number of these electric cars have already been delivered. In the course of the second half of 2021, when the other deliveries will have been made, our Co2 emissions per kilometer will have been reduced by more than 40% compared to 2019!* We’re ecstatic and very proud about this result! Proper change management and attractive options are key People often oppose change, but by handling this project properly, the transition to an electric fleet is going very smoothly. In our organization, we always communicate and inform in a transparent way about anything and everything. Naturally, that includes the transition to a green fleet. In addition, we make any necessary facilities available to our employees, such as the charging infrastructure at our offices, a charging solution for at home and one for on-the-go. Our fleet experts are also always there to help our employees with questions and provide all the necessary information. As a result, our employees (and freelancers) follow our ambitious goal of having an emission-free company fleet by 2025. We’ve come a long way in less than two years thanks to great teamwork. We therefore believe that the ICE lease contracts in the coming years will be replaced by a green mobility choice. #letsgogreentogether We’re glad we already started this project years ago, as it prepared us for the transformation to a fully electric fleet. New and increasingly appealing models appear on the market every year, making the switch to an EV easier. In addition to the Tesla Model 3, employees and freelancers at ACA are currently driving the Kia e-Niro, Volkswagen ID.3 and Mercedes EQC. Later this year the BMW iX3, Audi e-tron (Sportback) 55, Volkswagen ID.4 and Ford Mustang Mach E will follow. Technology keeps moving forward, which means that the range of the battery constantly increases. Furthermore, the charging infrastructure along Belgian roads is increasing rapidly. Thanks to these advances, we’ve noticed that the majority of our employees no longer suffer from range anxiety and other concerns that come with an EV. Other green initiatives at ACA Group We don’t want to just help our planet by offering electric company cars. We foresee other initiatives that help to limit the ecological footprint. This includes offering a bicycle lease, public transport, teleworking, workplaces close to home and energy-saving systems in our offices. As time moves on, we’ll keep our eyes peeled for other initiatives that help reduce our carbon footprint. * We started our project towards a green fleet in 2019. We took delivery of the first EVs at the end of that year.

Reading time 7 min

Shari Paret

Every year ACA organizes a Ship-IT Day. Different teams, which are composed on the basis of skills and interests, try to solve (potential) problems of customers in one day. They work out innovative ideas and explore new technology. Together with those customers, the Ship-IT teams validated various innovative ideas and developed them into a Proof-of-Concept. You can discover them all below: 1. Spot the free charging spot Anyone who has been following ACA for a while knows that we are fully engaged in greening our vehicle fleet. In order to continue to grow, we must provide sufficient charging options. In addition, the 'facilities fleet' manager wants to map the use of charging stations and parking spaces in order to consider further optimizations and investments. For example, how many charging stations are not in use at a given moment, even though parking is taking place? Together with Mobility+, our partner and supplier of charging stations, some ACAs built a dashboard using Azure that optimizes the use of parking spaces and justifies potential investments with real-time data. The dashboard offers an overview of the status (free or occupied) of the charging stations in the underground car park of our office, in combination with the active charge-user. This allows the 'facilities fleet' manager to see who is parked in the relevant parking lot and to consult other important data and metrics. Employees with an EV can use an application to see where parking is still possible. 2. Widgets Home Automation The second project is part of an existing case for a customer who specializes in windows and window extensions. We had already developed an application for this customer that offers a lot of interesting functionalities for users. For example, the possibility to consult the air quality at home. To create an even better user experience, the team delved into widgets during Ship-IT Day. At the moment, users have to open the application every time to query the air quality. Since this can be a bit cumbersome at times, widgets now make it possible to send an alert without disrupting the daily flow and without requiring users to open the application beforehand. In other words, the team wanted to create an experience where the information automatically reaches the user. The application itself is written in Xamarin.Forms. While this turned out to be quite simple for Android, for iOS a native widget extension had to be developed in Swift and SwiftUI. Finally, the option has also been added to ask Google Assistant about the air quality in the home. 3. UGent: Keyword matching Ghent University has developed a mechanism that connects researchers and project proposals. Each researcher has its own bibliography from which the tool can extract information about expertise and research topics. And keywords are also extracted from the project proposals. Based on this, the Keyword Matcher makes a list of researchers and project proposals that match. Users can therefore quickly see which projects are of interest to researchers at Ghent University. The Keyword Matcher was built by the university itself, but the tool could use some improvement, especially in terms of UX and UI. During a workshop, our Ship-IT Day team first looked for the user's pain points. For example, it was cumbersome to select a researcher and it was also not possible to share one specific result. For the cumbersome selection of a researcher, the UI team developed a live search input field that can search for multiple things, such as name and first name, but also a unique ID per researcher. In addition, users now also have the option to export the complete list of results or a specific result or to share it directly via email with, for example, one or more researchers. 4. MyValipac - Micro Frontends The fourth team wanted to transform various applications of our customer Valipac into one well-organized whole. To do this, they suggested building a new platform that could act as a kind of ecosystem. The focus was on the use of Micro Front Ends, with which the different business domains can be developed independently of each other. During the Ship-IT Day, the team wanted to guide the customer to the start of such a platform and also map the use and benefits of Micro Frontends for themselves. The project was a great success. For example, the team found that the “assembly” of Micro Front Ends goes very smoothly if you use the module federation principles correctly. The end result is a POC of a platform that consists of: a login based on different user rights, a platform landing page, a maintenance page, a task list page (internal module that is called in the platform), a link with legacy providers (external modules that are called up in the platform). For the end user, the platform has one UX and look feel, in other words it feels like one entity. While the frontend actually consists of several separate micro frontends, and several separate services are called in the backend. 5. NFT ticketing system with fan tokens for clubs, tournaments and festivals This team developed an NFT ticketing system with a virtual currency (fan token). NFTs are non-fungible tokens. The idea for Ship-IT Day was to develop a platform where fans can buy tickets online and receive fan tokens in exchange. The fan tokens are redeemable on the platform and can be used by supporters to purchase goods or services, such as: Merchandising Voting (participation in e.g. T-shirt design, music, etc.) Live Meet-ups, autographed gadgets or VIP tickets ... In addition, the Fan tokens in the Metaverse can be used to shop in your favorite Fan store through AR. 6. The Tech Radar Tech Radar is an online virtualization tool that shows which technology choices are and are not available in an organization or team. Based on this, you can determine whether the necessary knowledge is already available in-house. And if so, where is that knowledge and how you can make full use of it in projects. The first version of the Tech Radar was developed earlier this year by a colleague who did an internship at ACA. Although the application already contained many functionalities, we wanted to further optimize and operationalize the tool throughout ACA during the Ship-IT Day. The Tech Radar not only shows what knowledge and expertise we have in house, but also offers a visual representation of the evolution over time of a certain technology. Below you can see, for example, how often a tool is used within an organization. In addition to the classic visualization, there is also one with “quadrants” available. This not only shows whether a tool has been used, but also how much it is used within the organization. Depending on the popularity, the balls get bigger. The last visualization shows a top 5 of the technologies that are most often worked with or of which the most knowledge is present within the organization. 7. The Mobility+ charge card in your mobile wallet Every employee with an EV will receive a charging card. This makes it possible to charge the car in various places, such as the underground car parks of our offices. The physical charge card is not always handy. Especially if you suddenly notice that you have forgotten your charge card. The charge card is also sometimes a bit cumbersome for our partner Mobility+. It costs money to produce the card, the charge card has to be sent by post, etc. As a solution, this team came up with the idea to put the existing charge card in a mobile wallet in the existing Mobility+ app. Every time you log in to the app, you will arrive at the general screen with various assets, including the digital charge card. The mobile solution is not only convenient for daily use, new users no longer have to wait for their plastic card during onboarding. And it is even possible to start a charging session offline. 8. Chatbot integration for our customer This project team started working for one of our customers, who remains anonymous. Making the use of data or interactions easier through a conversational interface, that was the scope of the project of the last team and our client. At the beginning of the hackathon it became clear that this could not only offer an advantage on the website itself, but also provide onboarding flows on other media such as Facebook or Whatsapp. Or even to let partners do onboarding, while maintaining internal control. Although no one had experience with it, the team members decided to get started with Power Virtual Agent. The big advantage of this tool is the possibility to work with several people on the same chatbot. One of the team members is a project manager who, despite a lack of technical knowledge, was able to build a lot himself thanks to the low-code capabilities of the tool. It eventually resulted in a working chatbot that is able to collect the necessary information, do data validation (both locally and on server), and fully handle the effective registration. It is certainly the intention to further develop this story, possibly with other technology than during the hackathon. And the winner is… Project 1, 'Spot the free charging spot'! The winning team was rewarded with dinner and a CoolBlue voucher. Many of our employees voted for this project because of its innovative nature and added value for both ACA itself and for our customers.

Reading time 10 min

Shari Paret

Every year, ACA IT-Solutions organizes an ACA Ship-IT Day. During this day, our team members get the chance to flesh out their innovative ideas from scratch and build up knowledge. Team members organize themselves into teams and work out the idea as much as possible in just one day. In this blog post, we’ll talk about this years’ ACA Ship-IT Day and the projects that came out of it! This year's theme With more than 180 passionate team members that focus on innovation and quality as key ingredients, this years’ theme is all about “innovation in just one day ”. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations had to go through a fast digital transition last year. With digital innovation as one of our expertises, we want to help other organizations with these challenges. The goal of this years’ ACA Ship-IT Day was to create innovative applications that can help our customers. Together with some of our customers, the different Ship-IT teams validated and fleshed out innovative ideas to proof-of-concepts. Let’s dive into them! The teams and projects of ACA Ship-IT Day 2021 1. My ACA: a personalized customer portal for our clients ACA always puts the end-user at the center of everything we do. With that in mind, the first team built a customer portal for our clients. This customer portal is a central place for essential information , where a customer can: find live updates and information concerning their projects, find invoices, documents and licenses, execute self-service actions. We want to have engaged, satisfied and happy customers. A customized portal is one thing that can help us to achieve this goal. Besides that main goal, working in this customer portal will increase efficiency, reduce unnecessary communication and improve and streamline service and support for our customers. The portal itself is built in Liferay and integrates with various back-end systems, such as: Atlassian Jira for projects, Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM) for incident information, Atlassian Confluence for documentation, Google BigQuery for financial information, and SalesForce for sales information. “I’m really happy with what we were able to achieve. During the day, I could see firsthand how we’re able to build something innovative in such a short time. I’m really impressed by how skilled my other team members are!” — Dorien Jorissen , Sustainability Expert at ACA Group 2. Job matching mobile application The team members from the mobile team got together to develop a prototype of a mobile application that matches job seekers and employers . Job seekers can swipe left (to like) or right (to dislike) on different job applications. Sounds familiar? We call it “Tinder for job seekers”. 😀 First, job seekers create a profile containing their resume on the app. After that, they’re ready to start swiping through the job applications they’re interested in . These job applications can be filtered by function, location, sector, seniority, and so on. Besides that, job seekers can send (chat)messages to the employer they’re interested in. Employers can put their company in the picture on the app by creating a company profile. They receive notifications when a job seeker likes them, but they can also see their search results and gather data and resumes on their dashboard. For employers, it’s also possible to send messages to and answer questions from job seekers that liked them. The mobile application is written in the React Native framework and in the React web language. The final output of that development is a native app on both iOS and Android. “I loved it! We started the day off with brainstorming to determine our focus and who would do what. During the day, we frequently came together to discuss our progress and prioritize any leftover tasks. We looked at what we’d be able to deliver at the end of the day, one hour at a time. Enough cause for some healthy stress :)” — Joren Vos , Mobile solution engineer at ACA Group 3. AI/AR for healing people One of our customers in healthcare was already looking for a solution that automatically recognizes certain objects, such as injuries. After all, daily follow-up of injuries on patients is time-consuming and not always precise. That’s why this third ship-IT team developed a complete AI/AR mobile solution for injury management . With this app, our customer could save time, reduce errors and improve the healing of injuries, since health professionals can focus more on patient care. The application can automatically detect, register and track injuries by using innovative techniques like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) . Thanks to guided real-time recognition, caretakers are guided to a perfect injury registration and receive real-time predictions. The app takes live pictures and adds additions through metadata for maximum ease-of-use. It’s possible to provide additional information in the application, like the mental and physical state of the patient, and predictions based on their database of injuries. Caretakers can access this database to find similar conditions and help their patient more efficiently. In the application, a personal timeline is integrated to follow the evolution of a certain injury, suggest actions and give tips. The patient can also perform checks themselves through the app. Lastly, the app features a dashboard with a summary of the identified injuries, statistics, to link unrecognized photos manually and view important trends. “It’s not easy to build an app to recognize injuries in just 8 hours. We started with the idea that the app wouldn’t be completely fleshed out at the end of the day, but that it’d be more of a prototype. We were able to show what is possible through Google’s machine learning kit on iOS. If we’d had an extra 8 hours, we could have trained our detection system with models to be able to differentiate between bruises and cuts, for example.” — Stijn Schutyser , UX / UI Designer at ACA Group 4. SecARity: Security in the workplace Safety in the workplace is crucial. For their Ship-IT project, this team wanted to increase the integration of safety regulations in the workplace and facilitate easy and user-friendly access for all employees in risk profiles. The team built an Augmented Reality (AR) application for our client IDEWE that offers safety instructions, regulations and information for a specific room and/or machine . This way, the team strongly reduces the chance of an accident happening. This application is flexible because there is no information overload and it activates automatically by proximity touchpoints. The application can also be customized to the user profile, which means they will get notifications based on their profile or function. While building this application, our team used two tools. The first one is Google ARcore , a free application to create AR applications. They used Google ARCore to recognize a certain object (in this case a QR code) and then map other things in the world relative to the location of this QR code and display them in AR. “For my bachelor’s thesis, I’ve experimented a lot with AR in an industry 4.0 context. Because of my prior experience, this project was truly made for me! I had a blast working with the team and thinking outside of the box. :)” — Louis Hendrickx , Java solution engineer at ACA Group 5. Service mesh to the rescue There are a number of architectural trends in the cloud-native space. In this Ship-IT project, a team wanted to explore the possibilities of service mesh for development and deployment for our client Valipac . A service mesh, like the open-source project Istio , is a way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another. This way, we have a better understanding of how applications behave and handle requests. The activation and tuning of out-of-the-box possibilities for Valipac mainly gives us insights into how applications work together via request-response mechanisms. This is insufficient to gain good insights into applications that work together asynchronously with events (i.e. event-driven architecture). Our team investigated how we can extend service mesh to also provide insight into these interactions on a topology graph. The team wrote a plug-in for the Istio service mesh based on WebAssembly . This plug-in generates the metric behind the topology graph with the source of an event’s producer and the destination of an event’s consumer. A lesson our team learned is that writing such a plug-in with WebAssembly is not that easy. After all, they didn’t have a lot of experience with the language since it’s relatively new technology. However, the team concluded that they can also build the topology graph from the application code itself in the same way. This way, we also see through the topology graph which applications work together via events, which leads to an increased observability of the application landscape for event-driven architectures such as Valipac. 6. Clickie - we're just a click away For our Atlassian experts, providing a great service for our customers is their top priority. They want to bring the ACA support closer to our client MLOZ . That’s why they wanted to integrate the applications that we run at MLOZ with our own track-it system . This way, our support team receives all relevant information immediately when the ticket is created by the client. Our team used Autoblocks for the integration in this project. Autoblocks is an integration platform built by our partner Adaptavist that integrates with Atlassian tools. 7. Order tracking for a client in the pharmaceutical industry The customer of this Ship-IT project provides transport to pharmacies and will expand this to patients as well in the future. They currently do not have much in place to track and follow up on orders. Our 8th Ship-IT stepped in and wanted to help them by building a user-friendly platform to track orders, receive end-user feedback and give the users the possibility to re-order certain items . By creating such an order tracking system, the team offers benefits to different actors of our client. Pharmacies will have a better overview of the status of the orders, which they can relay to their end customers. Patients on their end can place, follow and track orders in an easy and user-friendly way. 7. Geen vlam in mijn friet - fire detection model Our client is one of the most important producers of frozen potato products for private labels in the world. Their facilities house more than 1000 cameras that monitor the production lines. Currently, the video streams are monitored by operators. This causes that the operators have to supervise a vast amount of cameras. This means that incidents are not always detected immediately. When a fire breaks out, it may have a large impact on both safety and the production capacity. For this reason, this Ship-IT project focused on developing a real-time notification application that leverages machine learning and cloud infrastructure to detect fire from camera feeds. The task of identifying and locating a flame in video frames is an object detection problem. The You Only Look Once (YOLO) machine learning model is a state-of-the-art algorithm for real-time object detection. In this project, the team used a recent implementation of YOLO, YOLOV5, developed by Ultralytics. This single-stage object detector is based on a neural network architecture that extracts – during training – a set of informative features from input images, i.e., indoor and outdoor images with fire. Later, the trained model is used to identify the presence of fire for each frame. If a flame is detected, the model draws a bounding box around the flame and assigns a confidence score to that prediction. On the operational side, our solution starts from the subscription of a customer camera feed to a broker that initializes a Kinesis video stream, and also sends notifications to a processing queue provisioned with Amazon MQ (or similar). The queue is populated with individual video frame identifiers that are processed in parallel by calling the pretrained object detection model, i.e YOLOV5, deployed with AWS SageMaker. Once a flame is detected in any frame, a downstream event is then triggered to notify an application/notification engine. This architecture allows massive automation and scaling. In particular, it can scale horizontally by augmenting the number of parallel threads, as well as vertically by increasing the number of SageMaker instances through the auto-scale capability of SageMaker. In order to speed up the notification in case of a fire, we made it possible to build a mobile application that consists of a real-time notification, a picture of the location of the fire and a timestamp. And the winner is... At the end of the day, the different teams had to create a proof-of-concept to demo and give a presentation about. Every team pitched their project to all the other teams, who then voted for their favorite project based on the theme. Project 1, My ACA, was able to take home this year’s trophy! 🏆 Within ACA, we have been thinking about offering our customers an optimal customer experience for some time now. The ACA Ship-IT Day was the perfect opportunity to create such a portal on the basis of new tools. Because of the innovative factor and the added value for our clients, most of our employees voted for this project. The next steps are to test the proposal with a number of pilot customers and make an estimation for the further elaboration of MVP1, which will then be submitted to our management team. After all these steps, we start looking for a sponsor. Congratulations to the entire team of experts and all the other teams that contributed to this great Ship-IT Day. Looking forward to next year!