INNOVATION
Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. — Peter Drucker
What new technology could completely disrupt your business?
The biggest motivator for our clients seeking pure innovation in their business is the consequence of doing nothing: the status quo. They feel that if they don’t transform their business that their competitors will beat them in the marketplace with innovation and they will loose business. They see the trends in their business. For example, one customer told us that they understand that the millennials in business today will soon be leaders tomorrow. These future leaders will expect to do business on their mobile devices. So, they feel that if they aren’t able to connect with their customers via mobile, their competitors surely will, and they will ultimately loose the business.
Is your business the next:
- Taxi business replaced by Uber or Lyft?
- Book publisher replaced by Kindle?
- University replaced by Distance Learning?
- Yellow Pages replaced by Google?
What innovation will transform your industry and make your current business totally obsolete?
AREAS PREVENTING YOU FROM YOU FROM GROWING YOUR BUSINESS
Business are held back from growing or beaten by their competition by being stuck in the status quo in the following areas:
MANUAL PROCESSES
Are you dependent on manual processes to keep your business operating?
EXAMPLE 1: INFORMATION BUCKET BRIGADE
Many of our clients have come to us because they are frustrated with inefficient processes where people are handing off information between departments to then be reentered into another separate disconnected system . We call this an“Information Bucket Brigade”. Besides being inefficient, the practice introduces human error and information loss.
We have helped our customers solve this problem with custom software that fits their unique processes, reduces costs and increase cycle time.
- Are you frustrated with too many of inefficient handoffs between departments and disconnected systems?
- How quickly could you respond to your customer if you had one end-to-end system?
EXAMPLE 2: EXCEL HELL
It is surprising how many businesses we’ve worked with that use Excel spreadsheets as their main business system. We call this “Excel Hell”. There are a few understandable reasons why Excel Hell happens:
- Excel can be customized to fit their unique business process, and
- Excel is easy to learn and adopt as the accepted business process.
But, there are many down sides to running a business in Excel:
- It’s impossible to keep the business’s critical operational and financial data in sync because a simple change has cascading effects.
- There is no easy way to analyze or report on historical business data to see trends and opportunities for improvements.
As an example, we’ve worked with a couple of logistics companies that have managed tens of millions of dollars in business and hundreds of thousands of load annually on Excel spreadsheets because they couldn’t see trends like what activities were more profitable, or a loss. Or the client couldn’t scale their growth. We built a custom solution that eliminates the spreadsheets so they can scale their business. Are you in Excel Hell?
DECISION MAKING
Do you have visibility to real-time Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in your business?
One of our customers asked us to replace a manual process for tracking their KPIs with an automated system. Weekly they gathered operating and financial data from all their offices, nation-wide, and built a massive spreadsheet on the statistics to evaluate each locations performance. Our client’s investment paid off in the first week it was put into operations because they saw an opportunity to change performance in one of their offices that they weren’t able to see prior to automating their KPIs and sharing results within the business.
We build KPI dashboards that are unique to our customer’s business processes that automatically extract data from their accounting and operations systems to provide dashboards for all employees to see. Making the information available for everyone to see, such as on a flat panel display in the lobby, helps to keep employees focused on what matters. The payout for a KPI dashboard is almost immediate because the visibility of their performance changes behavior.
CONNECTIVITY
How long does it take to respond to your customers, colleagues and suppliers?
One of our clients had better quality and service than their competition, but they were frustrated that they lost business because they were perceived as not being as technologically advanced as their competitor. They feared they would lose more business because their clients wanted access more up-to-date information faster than they could provide.
We built a customer portal that automatically extracts information such as invoices, documents, and certificates that their customers can access directly. which increased cycle time for everyone. Our customer’s customer loves the new system.
How long does it take to deliver your product or service to your customer?
How long should it take?
HOW VALUABLE IS CUSTOM SOFTWARE TO YOUR BUSINESS?
CUSTOM SOFTWARE MAKES YOUR BUSINESS MORE PROFITABLE
The right software that fits your business processes like a glove can improve your business efficiency by 10 to 100 times. It increases revenue and profits, businesses efficiency, improves processes and quality, reduces cost and cycle time making it a great ROI.
CUSTOM SOFTWARE IMPROVES YOUR MARKET SHARE
Custom software improves the services you offer your customer, improving your company’s reputation and image, making your business more competitive and visible in the market place, distinguishing you from your competition.
CUSTOM SOFTWARE INCREASES YOUR BUSINESS’ STRATEGIC VALUE
Custom software has a strategic advantage as a proprietary intellectual property tailored to your unique business processes by increasing your business’s market value when you sell or exit. This value is a high multiple to the initial investment.
HOW WE WORK
We following a 4-phased approach to building custom software for our clients
PHASE 1 – DISCOVERY
During the Discovery Phase we meet with your business’s key stakeholders to gather business and process automation requirements. Requirements gathering is done by one of our experts who has knowledge and experience of your industry, as well as of software development, to reengineer your current requirements into an improved process design.
PHASE 2 – DESIGN
In the process of fleshing out the requirements we transform what we learned about business (the “as-is” state), to the improved way to run your business (the “tobe” state), in an improved process design. This results in a requirements document that includes the following deliverables:
- A business requirements document that defines each requirement down to an “atomic” level, where each statement is a simple plain-English sentence describing a single requirement, described in the “to-be” state.
- A wire-frame design of key user interfaces and screens or process flow so you can see a design prototype of how the custom system will work once developed. For mobile apps, high fidelity graphical screen designs may also be done.
- A fixed price quote of the cost to build the new software based on the stated business requirements and design. This fixed price estimate also includes project duration.
We review these deliverables with your key stakeholders to ensure accuracy. If the fixed-price quote is a good return on Software investment, we proceed to the next phase.
PHASE 3 – DEVELOPMENT
During this phase we program the application according to the requirements and design. During this phase you will see the application take shape, and you will test each function as it becomes available to provide feedback based on requirements and design.
PHASE 4 – ACCEPTANCE
During the Development phase you have been reviewing the application and doing incremental testing, so that by the end of Development, you will just need to do a final acceptance testing to make sure the entire application is working as expected to meet your requirements. You then sign off accepting the application and we will put your application into production for you to use in your business.
WHO WE ARE
We are a Houston-based team of experienced business practitioners who are also technologists. We are passionate about making our customers more profitable by eliminating work and reducing cycle time by building custom software that fits their unique business processes like a glove.
OUR TYPICAL CUSTOMER
Our typical customer is a fast growing business that has become highly profitable by being unique in their market. These niche businesses have unique business processes that don’t fit off-the-shelf software solutions. A custom solution makes their business run more efficiently and create a competitive advantage.
WE ARE BUSINESS PRACTITIONERS
We have hands-on experience in areas such as accounting, finance, procurement, materials management, logistics, HR, and service delivery; basically most areas of business administration across multiple industries.
WE ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS
In addition to our business practitioners also being experienced programmers, we have a team of 400+ programmers in Costa Rica with experience in most mainstream technologies, providing both scalability and technical coverage.
WE’RE BILINGUAL: WE SPEAK ‘BUSINESS-ESE’ AND ‘COMPUTER-ESE’
Our customers have told us that we are the only software development company that understands how their business runs and how to build the solution. In other words, we speak both languages; our customer’s language, “Businessese” and “Computer-ese”, to bridge the gap between the business and technology.
Contact Us
If you think custom business software would be a good idea for your business, please click here to fill out the form completely. We will then contact you to set up a call to answer your questions, for us to get an understanding of your business, and for both of us to decide if it makes sense to go further.
