Laurence Leach (Engineering, 2003), Technical Director at AFC Technologies

Alumnus helps provide IT solutions for COVID-19 testing and booking websites

Alumnus Laurence Leach (Engineering, 2003) has been working as the lead architect on the new NHS COVID-19 national testing and booking websites with the company ACF Technologies where he is Technical Director. We recently caught up with him to find out what the experience has been like.

Whilst at Exeter, Laurence studied a BSc in engineering which comprised of a wide range of disciplines: electronics, materials, environmental, and computing. He says: “I have great memories from Exeter – it’s a beautiful campus, and the city itself is vibrant and exciting. I’ve always been fairly science and technology focussed, but having an engineering skillset helps you learn how to put a structure around approaching problems. From university I gained a mind set to solve problems and to make things ‘easier’ for my colleagues and myself, which has been immensely beneficial. ”

After graduating he worked in electronic engineering but eventually moved to the IT sector and has been working for his current employer, ACF Technologies for 10 years. Which has expanded greatly since he joined – they were an office of four people, and now are over 100 people in offices in several countries.

The UK office of AFC Technologies - pictured prior to the pandemic and social distancing.

In April 2020, the company was given the contract of working on the new NHS COVID-19 national testing and booking websites, followed by the Vaccination project in October 2020, which were exciting projects to utilise his skills and experiences.

Laurence says that: “In my professional role I’ve always strived to adopt more standardised technology, adhere to best practises, deliver better training for team-members, and learn as much as possible about technology, projects, business, markets etc. When we were approached by the NHS as potential suppliers, we were asked if we could react in a very short time period. Previous years of enabling the business with technologies and standards allowed us to react very quickly to a pretty much unprecedented situation!

“My role within the project has been to work with the NHS and my own team members to really understand the required behaviour for a national booking system – and then design and lead a team to develop a solution. Obviously, a huge part of that is to understand potential risks: might users use the system in unexpected ways, how many users might be using the system at one time, how do we adapt to changing requirements, how do we ensure data security?

“The solution developed is a platform that allows users to find local centres, find timeslots, enter their details and get a booking. We also enable the NHS teams to easily set the availability and capacity of the centres nationwide. We have to manage many hidden complexities around multiple test types, vaccination types, dose spacing, eligibility, accessibility needs, reporting and large capacity (the entire UK, hundreds of millions of requests), and it has to load very fast.

“Working on a project that improves the experience customers and users is very rewarding – but to know that the work you are delivering is a key piece of the fight against COVID-19, and is helping people across the country makes me extremely proud!”

An example of the NHS COVID-19 vaccination booking website that Laurence and AFC Technologies have worked on.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created challenges for businesses and individuals across the globe and we asked Laurence how it had affected AFC technologies. He said: “Interestingly, our business has reacted quite well during the pandemic. We very quickly identified that we need to provide a ‘virtualised’ interaction solution (SafelyQ.me) to allow other businesses to meet their customers digitally, virtual queuing, online applications, video meetings etc., which several businesses have now adopted. There had already been a trend in that direction in prior years, which we had been preparing for – the pandemic, drove us to adapt more quickly.

“The pandemic may leave the world permanently changed, especially in the ways business work with their customers. My role is to help our business identify what those new trends are and prepare solutions that help our business, and other business adapt to that.”

ACF technologies have also just recorded their podcast episode with CXInsider on the topic of delivering the NHS COVID-19 testing and vaccination systems, which you can listen to online now via Spotify, Podbean, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts and find out more about the project.

Date: 21 January 2021