Successful customers / Devoteam

Overview

Devoteam is a leading consulting firm focused on digital strategy, tech platforms, and cybersecurity. By combining creativity, tech, and data insights, they empower customers to transform their business and unlock the future.

With 25 years of experience and 8,000 employees across Europe and the Middle East, Devoteam promotes responsible tech for people and works to create better change.

One of their projects was an app built for a public institution in Spain dealing with the labor market and handling information regarding public employment assistance. The organization collects and stores this data in the app and publishes official documents with employment statistics over time.

The main features of the app were designed to:

  • Keep track of employment data.
  • Import information from a variety of sources whenever necessary.
  • Present it in different ways, including generating monthly and annual reports.

The Challenge

Before creating the app, the organization used Excel sheets as its primary software. By hiring Devoteam, they were looking to go digital with their manual processes.

To smooth the transition and minimize the impact on training and user experience, Devoteam knew they had to provide the app with a familiar spreadsheet look and feel. It had to be intuitive because users needed to have the same type of functionalities, movements, and expectations they had with their original tool.

Devoteam initially analyzed building the whole application from scratch, but their estimates showed the project would be long and the app itself heavy and prone to errors.

Knowing that they needed a table-like presentation layer and a tool that would allow them to develop the necessary features, they began searching for a library that matched these requirements.

The Solution

The search ended when they came across Handsontable. Devoteam discovered that the JavaScript data grid's design and functionalities were the closest to the ones their client had experienced using Excel.

Handsontable gave them a robust, fully-featured tool that's ready to use out of the box. The data grid helped them avoid the need to develop and test something that would have cost much more of their valuable time.

For Devoteam's purposes, the most important Handsontable features are all about associations:

  • Associating a data type to a field
  • Associating validations to a field
  • Associating formulas to a field

This last feature is especially important as users need to be able to create a field that's the result of a formula and uses data extracted from a database or an Excel spreadsheet.

The Result: saved time, improved user experience

Not having to recreate the data validation, formatting, and dynamically computed field features means that Devoteam saved an estimated 30% on development time by implementing Handsontable.

They passed these savings on to the client in the form of delivering a high-quality app in much less time.

And the benefits are clear:

  • The client can now import information whenever they want.
  • They can provide individual access to any autonomous Spanish community that wants to inspect its own data – which was impossible in their previous Excel-based system.
  • The information is centralized, and it's accessible from any community that has its data available on the system.

When it comes to user experience, the client has seen a smooth transition from the previous solution to the current Handsontable-based app. Since the data grid forms the majority of the app, users are constantly interacting with it because they see and manage the data all the time.

In other words, Handsontable hasn't enhanced the user experience. It is the user experience.

Quote Handsontable is a useful tool that spared us a lot of work and was valuable in terms of the overall project outcome.

Dejan Popovic

Dejan Popovic

Director, SW Engineering Services
at Devoteam Spain