When a trophy is on the line, the teams and fans expect a fair game. To ensure this, the league must supply the best officials. Within the Michigan High School Athletic Association, all team coaches rate game officials throughout the season, assessing the quality and fairness of game officiating. The MHSAA's process for registering, identifying, and rating an official was a manual process and painful for everyone involved. Though coaches were required to rate game officials, compliance with the requirement was low. The MHSAA needed a solution. Arana Software developed a new, ground-up system for managing officials, official assignments, and official ratings. With a new interface module added to their existing website, near-real-time integration with Arbiter Games, and weekly reminder emails to coaching staff, the MHSAA now has a cutting-edge system for managing the quality of game officials. And backed by their new Official Ratings reporting system, they show that compliance is way up. This solution is a win for everyone.

The chemical engineering firm came to Arana looking to replace an aging mission-critical component of their software infrastructure. What they needed was a better way to communicate with hardware on chemical mixing tanks. Their PLCs controlled a critical step of the industrial manufacturing process. Our solution made use of modern technologies like AngularJS, Nancy, and SignalR to provide a secure, performant, intuitive user experience. Accessible in the browser and available anywhere, the new system offers real-time data on equipment performance. With this cutting-edge web application, Chem-Trend can be assured of delivering consistent quality to their customers every time.

For over four years, Arana worked closely with the online kitchen retailer, ChefsCatalog.com. As a technical partner and mentor to their development team, we helped utilize many new web technologies with which they had little prior experience. Over the course of the relationship, we helped maintain their existing system and modernized their platform, optimizing the stability of their site and the performance of their code. Leveraging Arana''s expertise, CHEFS was able to focus their attention on their real business goals of running a robust and stable e-commerce catalog, keeping availability and performance strong even through the busiest times of the year.

At Arana, we are always looking to level-up our own game. One way we accomplish this is by creating and maintaining our own libraries to wrap—and improve upon—common application functionality. Cobweb is an open-source, base-class utility library for .NET. It offers a variety of features to improve code quality, developer efficiency, and testability for ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and NHibernate, and can easily be used as a foundational framework for many .NET web projects. We make Cobweb available on Github and as a package on NuGet. In doing so, and in keeping this and our other open source libraries up-to-date, we benefit both our clients and the broader software development community.

When the McCreadie Group approached us, they had the problem that every company hopes to have: growth. Their product, PharmAcademic—a web-based assessment tool used to manage educational pharmacy programs—worked great, but they had outgrown some of the internal platforms and component libraries used to maintain and extend the product. Their existing tools, and the application's underlying Backbone.js codebase, worked perfectly to get the application off the ground, but could no longer keep up with inhancements to functionality and the ongoing needs of their customers. We solved their growth problem through tooling and workflow enhancements, including a conversion from BackboneJS to Marionette and use of our own Meshweaver framework. The result: much less code, reduced overall code complexity, and increased velocity when turning around new features and functionality. PharmAcademic is ready for the next level of growth.