IET opts for River Valley’s ReView platform for member management

Published by Rivervalley Technologies on

London, UK, 11 October, 2016 – The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), one of the world’s largest engineering institutions, is launching a new system for managing professional registration applications, such as Chartered Engineer and Incorporated Engineer. The IET grants these registrations on behalf of the Engineering Council UK, after a detailed assessment process of each applicant. With over 167,000 members, the process is heavy on administration.

The IET approached 10 companies, including River Valley, to bid in building a system to manage the assessment and interview process and to minimise administration. Somewhat to the surprise of IET, it turned out that the winning bid was a solution that already existed, and that could be configured to their precise needs, namely ReView, River Valley’s peer review platform. River Valley recognised that although the requirements for the project were unrelated to journal peer review, the process was in fact simply a highly specialised form of peer review. There were many complications and intricacies, such as reviewers having to be automatically chosen by their speciality, and having to be grouped into “panels”, including face-to-face meetings.

One by one, each requirement for the system was incorporated by River Valley’s programmers, resulting in a nimble, user-friendly platform. Built using the latest web programming technologies, the system is “responsive”, with full functionality on tablets and mobiles. Instructions were provided, but most users commented that they had not needed to refer to them! River Valley’s high level of data security was of course essential in the project.

Michelle Richmond, Director of Membership & Professional Development at the IET said: “River Valley fully understood our requirements for the project, and configured their systems to the precise needs of the IET.

River Valley’s Kaveh Bazargan said: “The IET project was a challenge, but it was a chance to prove the flexibility of ReView and how it could adapt to just about any role-based process, ranging from classic journal peer review to contract management. It has been a pleasure to work with the experts at the IET to deliver a fully customised system to help save time and deliver efficiencies.

About River Valley Technologies

River Valley Technologies was set up in 1988 in the UK by Dr Kaveh Bazargan. A physicist by training, his intense interest in the emerging area of desktop publishing led him to start a service company with the aim of delivering cutting edge technology to academic publishers. The company has expanded internationally, and remains at the forefront of publishing technology.

River Valley’s vision is to automate the publishing process through the RVPublisher platform that includes RVRite, ReView, ProofCheck, and RVFormatter. River Valley was one of the first companies to embrace “authoring in the cloud”, with the first incarnation of RVPublisher some 9 years ago. The company continues to look at areas of publishing that can be improved or automated, with the primary aim of speeding up scholarly communication.

River Valley’s clients include Cambridge University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and IOP Publishing.

About the IET

The IET is one of the world’s largest engineering institutions with over 167,000 members in 150 countries. It is also the most interdisciplinary – to reflect the increasingly diverse nature of engineering in the 21st century. Energy, transport, manufacturing, information and communications, and the built environment: the IET covers them all. The IET is working to engineer a better world by inspiring, informing and influencing our members, engineers and technicians, and all those who are touched by, or touch, the work of engineers.

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