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Bloodhound, Polymorph case study


Cape Town, 01 Jan 2014

The partnership between Polymorph and Bloodhound has opened new opportunities in various industry sectors and resulted in significant growth in revenue.

Bloodhound Technologies has, since inception, been focused on innovation and breaking new ground in the communications and technology sector. In 2005, before the smartphone era, the company developed and manufactured a custom-made, rugged feature phone targeting the security industry.

Fact sheet
Solution: File13
Industry: ICT
Provider: Polymorph
User: Bloodhound Technologies

These devices used RFID readers and tags to manage and monitor the location of security guards while on duty. A central management system was developed to distribute certain tasks to each security guard.

The business grew. After a few years, smartphones were introduced to the world, and Bloodhound Technologies' directors saw a great opportunity to use and introduce new product features by replacing the company's custom-designed rubberised phones with smartphones. This would enrich the product, giving customers a better experience thanks to greater functionality. It would also reduce manufacturing costs.

In 2014, Polymorph came on board as the preferred software development partner. It was tasked to develop Bloodhound's first smartphone mobile application, which would replace the existing customised phone and software. This was the start of a long-term friendship and partnership between these two companies. The new smartphone still had to interface with the existing Internet of things (IOT) platform while introducing a significant upgrade in accurate indoor tracking, using BTLE technology. The development process has been explained in more detail in a previous white paper.

"We are very pleased with our decision to partner with Polymorph," says Bernard Slabbert, CEO of Bloodhound. "With Polymorph's help, we could upgrade our product offering to use smartphone technology. One of the reasons we chose Polymorph as our development partner was its knowledge and significant experience in indoor tracking using BTLE Bluetooth beacons. This has become one of our key differentiators, as most of our competitors still only use standard GPS technology, which can only be used for outdoor tracking. Being able to accurately track the position of products indoors has opened up numerous possibilities for us in new markets."

After seeing how well the security market adapted to the use of the smartphone application for indoor and outdoor location tracking, and for humanising staff management, the next opportunity that Bloodhound explored was in the cleaning sector.

Based on the same technology as the security guard app, Polymorph developed a tool that would revolutionise the way cleaning teams operated. It replaced clipboards and paper trails with a digitised platform, which could track in real-time the whereabouts of staff and provide functionality to monitor where and when cleaning products needed replacement.

The new BTLE indoor tracking system replaced the old system, which still relied on RFID tags. This had the advantage of providing proof of presence and proof of service, a major advantage when signing service-level agreements. It cancelled out disputes between client and service provider. Polymorph also developed a reporting system that could be managed from a central dashboard to notify key persons and management of their employees' performance.

Since introducing the new cleaning management system in SA, Bloodhound has signed contracts with prominent cleaning service delivery companies and has significantly grown its revenue within 12 months after releasing the new product to market.

"The excellent product development, done in collaboration with Polymorph, has opened new doors for us as a company. The new product, called File13, is seeing a rapid growth in sales in the security sector and is seeing new opportunities in other industries such as construction, occupational health and safety, and food and hygiene," Slabbert concludes.

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Editorial contacts

Richard Barry
Polymorph
(021) 880 1034