Lockheed Martin UK

Southpoint successfully delivered a 12-month web development contract to the UK arm of the US defence giant.

Industry: Defence (high security)

Role: Web Developer

Lockheed Martin UK is the UK-based arm of Lockheed Martin Corporation and has operated in the country for nearly 80 years. Headquartered in London, we employ approximately 2,000 people at more than 20 sites across the country.

In 2017 Southpoint won a 12-month contract to supply web development expertise services to Lockheed Martin UK. Based at their Hampshire facility in Whiteley, the contract delivered maintenance to existing, and new web solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. Southpoint were the single point of contact for all SharePoint web development for the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) region which also included Canada.

Projects delivered

Digital HR documentation solution

The HR department needed to digitise employee records dating back over 10 years. A system design had been produced that required scanning of employee records in each HR office in the main UK locations. Document scanners had been procured that provided secure network access to the data source, in this case SharePoint Server 2013.

Southpoint developed the SharePoint solution in-line with the design that handled new submissions from the scanners. Each UK location was allocated their own document libraries for their departments which allowed a scalable solution for this large organisation. The file name was configured via the scanner software to identify the UK location and department information, so that the documents could be categorised using a custom SharePoint Content Type for the document library.

IT Support System Status Application

IT and Operations managers required a systems status application for the IT support team to manage. This essentially was a single-page application running on SharePoint Server as a fully responsive page developed with the Bootstrap 3 responsive framework, without any of the normal SharePoint application features visible. This enabled the application to be viewed on monitors within the offices of the organisation, on desktops and more importantly, company mobile phones.

The UI was a simple list of agreed services that had a traffic system of red amber or green icons. The support team had access to a single SharePoint list that they managed the status of each service which was a single list item. SharePoint Workflow was used to send out automated responses for each status and for escalating to seniors if issues were ongoing.

Flight Simulator Training Asset Management

The UK’s flight simulator training division is based at various M.o.D. sites across the UK. Each facility contained multi-million pounds worth of assets that were undocumented. These ranged from highly sophisticated simulators to other smaller items of equipment used within the facility.

A new divisional manager recognised this as a significant risk and contacted the UK IT department to find a solution. Initially the manager requested the acquisition of an off-the-shelf asset management system. This was rejected by information security on the grounds that the est available apps invariably run on a cloud server and that was out of the jurisdiction of Lockheed Martin.

Southpoint were approached as the resident SharePoint web developer to investigate a possible bespoke solution. Working with the client to establish requirements based on the features of the requested cloud application, Southpoint designed a bespoke system using SharePoint lists and libraries as a data source on a secure site collection.

The bespoke design made it possible to eliminate a lot of features that the cloud app provided but would never be needed. Conversely, the design provided mobile phone bar-code scanning features, that would otherwise have been premium features of the cloud app. This enabled the asset managers in the various locations to apply an asset tag sticker to an item and scan it. If the asset tag unique code was not present on the system it would produce a form for the asset to be added to the register.

This provided a unique and effective asset management system for a division within this large organisation. The cost of the application was less than a single year subscription to a cloud service, and also satisfied the information security departments concerns.

Core Skills for this contract

  • SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise including Administration
  • SharePoint Workflows
  • jQuery / AJAX
  • SharePoint Rest API
  • Bootstrap 3
  • Font Awesome
  • HTML / CSS / JavaScript
  • Information Architecture
  • Graphic Design