Software review
We can pay you a site visit to learn about your business, your existing IT infrastructure and requirements, and identify areas where improvements could be made. We will then produce a report, laying out our recommendations.
In 2004, an exporting business inherited a largely manual operation from the company’s previous owners to manage large quantities of data relating to the processing of customer quotations and orders. We spent two Consultancy days on-site with them learning about their operations, and proposed the development of an automated solution integrated into Excel. The result was a system that now allows them to handle a significantly greater volume of order lines each week, and which continues to grow as their business expands.
This project is covered in more detail in the AutoQuote Case Study.
Troubleshooting
We provide ad-hoc, expert technical advice to help companies troubleshoot specific problems in their existing systems. Examples might be where a server starts to run slowly or a website or program is reporting an error. We can liaise with your in-house IT department if necessary. Consultancy services can be delivered either remotely via the internet or via a site visit, depending on the nature of the problem.
A customer was having problems with nightly backups that were locking up the database for hours at a time and preventing users from logging in. We identified a different way to back up their data, which involved only locking the database for a few seconds rather than a few hours.
See our blog post Backups affecting system performance – our LVM2 solution for more information.
Technical advice
Your company might be developing a software system in-house, using your own IT staff. In a Consultancy role, we can oversee such a project and offer technical advice during each stage of development. This is more cost-effective to you than employing an IT expert full-time.
Edinburgh-based electronics company, Wolfson PLC was considering whether to develop a bespoke document versioning system in-house or to use an off-the-shelf package that fulfilled most, but not all of their requirements. We examined their proposal and conducted a feasibility study of the two approaches and delivered a report of our findings, which included project cost, data storage and performance considerations.