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Innovative company The Distance receive grant funding for new software

**At this difficult time, our team is fully committed and available to offer businesses support and guidance to help businesses recover and grow through new innovation. **

The PAPI Project continues to support businesses in York, North Yorkshire, East Riding with 40% grants of between £8,000 and £20,000 for the purchase of equipment which will create new products, services and jobs and will be available through to mid 2022 to help the region’s business recover and prosper.

Set up in 2009, The Distance are a mobile app development company who develop cutting-edge apps for start-ups or mobile/digital transformation solutions for national and global enterprises. They are platform focused experts in Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Facebook’s React native. The agency has been developing apps since the introduction of the first iPhone and has created more than 100 mobile applications for its clients. Since the company set up in 2009, they grew steadily from two staff to nineteen staff by 2018.

During 2018, managing director, Anthony Main, had innovative plans for continued business growth. Whilst developing apps for clients, The Distance recognised an opportunity to develop a framework solution to allow them to provide services in a more efficient and cost effective way. The majority of apps use very common functionality – which can then be personalised or amended as the brief requires. Repeating the process for each client was costly and time consuming. In light of this, The Distance began to develop ‘The Core’, a web-based software product which would provide essential content and data services to mobile applications.

The Distance were introduced to the Product and Process Innovation (PAPI) project during the planning stages of the project. PAPI provide 40% grants for equipment to enable innovation. Between £8k and £20k funding is available for projects costing £20k+. To help develop ‘The Core’, The Distance were awarded a £20,000 grant from the PAPI Project in order to purchase several software ‘building blocks.’ The funding allowed them to make significant progress in development earlier than they had planned.

The benefits of ‘The Core’s’ development have been felt across the business. The Distance can now provide a unique selling point as customers only invest in bespoke features.  The company can now provide a full end-to-end app development lifecycle and a more stable and evolving code base, which is faster to use and enables efficiency savings for customers.

Unlike other third party data services, ‘The Core’ is platform agnostic and therefore can be hosted internally on the customer’s preferred Cloud service. The module structure and system architecture also enable The Distance to fully customise the backend interface. The backend system is then available to anyone with internet connection and browser software. Little training and experience is needed to use the product, meaning it can be utilised by a range of users.

The developments also reduced the skill requirements across the product development lifecycle, meaning junior staff are able to work on more interesting and fulfilling project features. Overall, these efficiency improvements made a major contribution to a 40% increase in turnover target and led to three new staff being employed. ‘The Core’ has been featured in a variety of applications for clients including; the NHS, British Forces Foundation and EDF Energy.

Innovative companies, like The Distance, can benefit from funding from the PAPI project. Up to £20k funding is available for SME businesses in York, North and West Yorkshire and East Riding.

Further information on the PAPI project please visit: www.papi.org.uk or call 01904328076.

For more information about The Distance, visit https://thedistance.co.uk

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This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by PAPI Project .