Avison Young is a global real estate advisor working across 20 countries with over 283 million square feet of properties under management. Their UK rating team are one of the UK’s largest business rates specialists, they work with clients to develop bespoke strategies and solutions to reduce their property liabilities.
UK government devolution has resulted in an increasing divergence in business rates liability, appeal process and legislation across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Avison Young has helped over 2,600 clients achieve a combined saving of £3.5bn since 2010.
Avison Young’s existing business rates platform was built with a legacy technology stack which could no longer be maintained. The platform exhibited several limitations – new features were increasingly difficult to add, the infrastructure could only be hosted on-premises and users complained of slow performance and an outdated interface.
Avison Young urgently needed a replacement in order to stay competitive within the commercial business rates sector and offer their clients key services to minimise their business rates liability. A cloud-based solution was required, to be developed with robust frameworks and infrastructure to guarantee high availability and performance. The mission-critical liability calculation engine had to operate within tight timescales in either single or batch calculation modes. The system needed to integrate with key external systems including the Valuation Office Agency API for submission of ‘Checks’ and ‘Challenges’ to rate demands, the Box document management SaaS platform and Salesforce CRM.
Avison Young engaged Transparity to design, architect and build a new Rating Platform, to be hosted in the cloud.
During the first project phase, key business requirements were agreed through a series of stakeholder workshops, and the existing platform was analysed along with the RFI requirement list. The technical architects at Transparity translated these requirements into a series of specifications for each key module of the platform. The mission-critical ‘liability calculation engine’ requirements were captured as an exhaustive set of Behaviour Driven Design (BDD) scenarios which could be used to directly test the engine functionality during and after the implementation. The ‘Check, Challenge and Appeal’ processes were specified as a series of UML state diagrams alongside segmented swim-lane diagrams to capture systems integration points. Modules with more user exposure included detailed wireframes so Avison Young could visualise the solution.
A Microsoft Azure cloud-based architecture was specified to ensure that the platform could meet the key performance and reliability conditions. Azure Service Bus was employed as an asynchronous message broker to ensure long-running processes could be handled without impacting the API or Web Client response times. Azure AI Search was leveraged to move the search function load away from the main SQL database.
The second project phase moved on to system implementation and testing. A team of highly experienced software engineers and test automation engineers within the App Innovation practice at Transparity developed the platform in close collaboration with Avison Young. A set of automation tests were implemented alongside each feature to verify quality and prevent regression issues from new features added in the future. The key business stakeholders at Avison Young were kept informed at every stage to ensure that features met business requirements with clarifications immediately fed back into the iterative development life cycle.
Following months of dedicated work and progress, the new platform was ready to go live, however, there was a final hurdle to overcome, migration of data from the legacy platform. There was no appetite to maintain and run the legacy platform in the future so all current client data needed to be migrated. Transparity developed a custom migration tool for this purpose, which handled rapid migration from multiple source databases into a single target database. The necessary schema mappings were encoded into the migration tool and existing entity relationships were maintained.
The new business rates platform has been in use for several years and Avison Young is delighted with the overall performance and functionality. The platform is widely regarded as setting new standards of industry-leading performance and has enabled Avison Young to be extremely competitive within the commercial business rates sector.
Transparity continues to partner with Avison Young to provide ongoing maintenance and support for the platform to help ensure they maintain an edge within the marketplace for many years to come.
“When selecting our development partner for this project a key criteria was that they would work with us in partnership to both develop and maintain our new rating system. Transparity came on board in 2019 and quickly proved to us that they understood our complex requirements and could work with us to achieve our goals. The outcome is a system that our users find intuitive and easy to follow whilst delivering full functionality across the UK-wide business rates system. We continue to work with Transparity on a daily basis to support both our users and clients who have access to the system. The outcome of our partnership with Transparity is a business rates platform that leads the sector in innovation and usability.”
Howard Neal, Principal and Project Lead, Avison Young
