Business Services

Strategic Assessment

Whether you’re a small business just getting started or a sizeable enterprise looking to improve your existing products and services, our process starts with a comprehensive look into your organization. Before we recommend any action, we will spend time working with you to develop a thorough understanding of your business and how you feel it fits into your industry. Even if we are designing a solution for a particular department, we want to ensure that it doesn't interrupt the workflow anywhere else in your organization, and that it supports your other departments wherever possible. Correspondingly, any solution we provide will be tailored to suit all of your staff, from interns to executives.

Solution Assessment

If you're working on a project and looking into outside contractors, but you're having difficulty assessing their relative qualifications, or you just want an experienced set of eyes to support your decision-making process, let us help. We can work with you to assess an existing set of proposals from outside vendors, or, if you're in the earlier stages of the project, we can help you identify suitable contractors or define an RFP.

Even if you're looking to contract with us to design a targeted solution, part of our process in initiating work will always be to examine the existing landscape to see if there are any strong solutions already available in the market. If you're comparing offers, we encourage you to put all of your cards on the table and show us the other services you’re looking into. We will have a genuine conversation with you about the strengths and weaknesses of all the options available, including our own. If we identify another service that we believe will be the best fit, we will put you in touch with the provider and follow up with you to ensure that our recommendation was accurate and that your needs are being well served. We consider ourselves consultants first and foremost, which means that our job is to ensure that you achieve the highest quality results, wherever they can be found.

Project Management

One of the most common reasons for a project failing to meet expectations (or never reaching completion at all) is a lack of high quality, dedicated project management. This is especially the case with technical projects, where the official management role often shifts between business and technical departments over time. Whether you have an in-house staff or you're looking to bring in contractors, we can help you coordinate the entirety of a project, from requirements through delivery. Management doesn't have to be a time intensive responsibility, but having the right people in place to ensure proper communication and interaction throughout a project is crucial to its success.

Database Architecture & Design

We can help you build or retool databases for more comprehensive support of your business processes. We perform most of our work in MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, but have experience with a number of other databases, including Oracle, should the task dictate. Our focus in database architecture is on clarity and accessibility, ensuring all the data is well-organized for viewing and reporting on, as well as being easily readable, even to a new pair of eyes.

Application Design, Integration & Implementation

If you're currently working with standardized packages that don't meet your particular needs, or you're stuck running key business areas off of scattered spreadsheets, we can work with you to define and implement applications that are tailored specifically to your workflow. If you already have software that serves individual departments, but you find that you have difficulty coordinating between departments or systems, we'll work with you to develop software bridges, or, if necessary, develop new applications to integrate diverse departmental work into a single, fully interoperable system.

Data Migration

Whether you're trying to pull a bunch of spreadsheets together into a more coherent database, or moving a legacy system to a new architecture, we can help you smoothly transition the data. If you expect a significant transition period, we'll configure an ongoing system for data migration, allowing you to shift data over at your own pace. Often times, this process also presents a rare opportunity to clean up the system and improve data quality without worrying about potential downtime for applications.

Data Analysis & Reporting

If you're already capturing all of the data you need, but you're having trouble converting it to relevant information, or, if you simply feel that you aren't getting enough out of your system for what you're putting in, we can help you analyze and interpret your data. Whether it entails designing custom queries to provide targeted morsels of information on the spot or crafting reports to make statistical or qualitative information available to you on an ongoing basis, we'll ensure that you're getting the most out of your systems.

Service Examples

Agile Management

While agile development is gaining significant popularity in the technical realm, most departments still react slowly to new information, and suffer from ponderous, overly complex decision chains. We'll help you integrate agile concepts and policies into all aspects of your business. Everyone expects large business to move slowly, but with the right approach, you can quickly buck the trend and put yourself at a competitive advantage.

Manufacturing Analysis

If your business focuses on the distribution of physical goods, we can work with you to assess your current production and distribution models, then recommend improvements based on industry models, such as theory of constraints, as well as our own targeted analysis of your company.