Rebate management blog - Page 27 - Enable

Workplace happiness isn’t just about competitive pay and benefits. Increasingly, more people are placing a higher value on wellbeing and working conditions, where flexibility, career progression and team bonding are an integral part of the company culture. By investing the time and effort into understanding what makes our people happy at work improves both the general mood of each individual member of staff and over all morale. This investment in a positive culture helps individuals to feel like an integral part of our company who are also willing to invest in it.

One of Enable’s top priorities is to provide a positive environment for all of our employees to work in. We operate a social group of volunteers whose objective is to organize various social and charitable events for all staff members. These include large annual events such as the Christmas and summer parties, as well as smaller events such as quiz nights, meals out, video and board games and sporting activities such as five-a-side football. A huge appeal of these social events is that it gives our employees the opportunity to bond and take part in activities they might not otherwise have considered or have found the time to take up themselves.

Let’s dive in to the 5 key social events that Enable organizes to keep morale high and our employees productive.

6 min read

Our April DealTrack update is now available within your UAT (user acceptance testing) environment. This provides the perfect opportunity to test newly introduced features, solution improvements and performance enhancements.

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Over the past 17 years, Enable has forged strong relationships with some of the finest universities, bringing in the brightest students that they have to offer — with 79% of our analysts and developers graduating from one of the top 25 featured in the Times 2018 UK rankings! We regularly hold recruitment events and have formed close ties to the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham. This gives us the opportunity to engage and network with students, whist giving them a real insight into our company.

We particularly focus our recruitment on high achievers in numerate subjects, with 66% of our employees holding an undergraduate degree in either Maths or Science, and 41% attaining a Masters or PhD in their chosen field of study. This provides us with exceptional employees who not only possess outstanding technical skills, but also the ability to translate that knowledge into highly effective business solutions.

Recent starter Michael graduated from the University of Lancaster with a MSc in Computer Science before joining Enable as a graduate software developer. Michael has begun his career at Enable with scheduled self-paced learning time to cover our methodology and the broad range of technologies that we support before contributing to project work. Once a graduate is deemed to have sufficient knowledge and experience they are promoted, typically after just one year. Michael offers his thoughts on his experience as a graduate software developer at Enable so far.

5 min read

From the initial conception of an idea, analysing and defining your requirements through to the development of your software, a lot of time and effort is spent ensuring the finest details are catered for. It can be a common misconception that once the software build is complete the hard work is over and users can be let loose with the ‘end product’. There are still a number of important steps that need to be undertaken and considerations to be made following build completion, to ensure that you get the most out of your software.

Technical requirements for hosting

By the end of a software build phase, you should have already put a lot of thought and planning into how your software will be hosted. There are many hosting options available; including in-house options and a variety of cloud hosting providers, each of which could hold their own benefits for your business based on the type of software you are building. Enable’s hosting preference is cloud-based hosting platform Azure, benefiting us through increased flexibility, quick and easy scalability, a high level of security, and reduced costs. Regardless of which option you choose, it is important that your environment of choice is adequately prepared ready for your software to be deployed to avoid any last-minute hiccups.

5 min read

Buying groups, as the name suggests, are formed to give buying power to smaller independent companies through purchase consolidation. Whilst buying groups don’t typically have control over the systems implemented by members, they do need information from members in order to negotiate the best possible deals on their behalf. It has long been recognised that buying groups can have difficulties in committing to purchase volumes with any degree of certainty. That impacts both the buying group’s abi...Continue reading

Our February DealTrack update is now available within your UAT (user acceptance testing) environment. This provides the perfect opportunity to test newly introduced features, solution improvements and performance enhancements.

Continue reading

Twenty-fifteen saw the highest level of merger and acquisition activity in the UK since 2007 according to research by Experian. In fact, over 6500 mergers and acquisitions were completed in the UK in 2015 with a total value of £433bn. This was the highest value of deals since 2000. Brexit, the US election and US legislation changes have been blamed for a slight downturn in M&A since then, but nonetheless according to Dealogic the average merger or acquisition in 2016 was $104.2 million, and...Continue reading

For many businesses, the question is not if a disaster or power outage could happen, but when it will occur? And how severe it will be? As a company whose primary products are internet-based applications, it is of vital importance to Enable that our ability to host our clients’ applications remains unaffected in every eventuality that could be reasonably foreseen. Disaster recovery (DR) is not something that any business can afford to get wrong. This is why Enable takes it very seriously and, after recent events, can boast of having first-hand experience.

Sometime around 03:00 on Monday, December 4th, a water heater in the roof space in our unit 11 building failed and began to leak. The water heater was located above the stairwell and leaked through the first floor, destroyed ceiling tiles, flooded one of the staff toilets, and made its way through to the ground floor. Unfortunately, significant water had entered our server room. The water had run through all three server cabinets and the servers within. All local servers, networks, and internet access shut down after power was lost. This meant no access to telephone, email or any local IT infrastructure including domains, web servers, file servers, source control and deployment services.

One of the main advantages of hosting in the cloud rather than locally, is that no live systems or data were affected, this meant minimal impact on our clients. Also, due to sensible management of time and resources, projects that we had underway were still delivered to clients on time.

Ewan Gibb is the IT Manager at Enable and has been with the company for over 15 years, helping it evolve into the well-organized and responsive IT department that it is today. Ewan was heavily involved with the DR process for this incident from the moment it was reported, ensuring that our systems were back online and operating normally as soon as possible. Here are Ewan’s recollections of how the day’s events unfolded.

5 min read