The company that remembers
Everything your work stands on is assembled on your server: the site, the mail, the database of customers and deals, the store of company knowledge, and the assistants that work inside all of it. The parts are connected to each other, and all of it belongs to you.
For manufacturing and distribution, where there are several departments and the knowledge lives in people’s heads.
Sound familiar?
You add up what the company pays every month for somebody else’s services and realise you are paying for the right to use your own data. Leaving is not an option: everything is in there.
You try to connect two systems, and it turns out this is only done through a third one, also on subscription.
And the main thing is not in the systems at all. How cost is worked out here, why this customer gets deferred payment, what to do about a complaint: four people know that. One of them retires soon.
What is included
The site, the mail, the database of customers and deals, the tasks. Not five windows and not five passwords.
An email becomes an enquiry, an enquiry becomes a deal, a deal becomes a shipment. Nobody moves anything by hand.
What is now in people’s heads and in somebody’s folders: the rules, the documentation, the history of decisions. It sits in one place, and you find it with words rather than by file name.
They answer customers, search the documentation and prepare answers for your people. Each one knows its own stretch of work and its own limits.
Code, data and access are yours. You pay for the work while it runs; you pay nothing to use the finished system.
Who this is not for
If it is one stretch of work that hurts, don’t buy this. You would be overpaying for connectedness you don’t need yet. You want “The desk where nothing gets lost”: there one place is taken and done properly.
And honestly about the second limit. This is not a purchase after which you can stop paying attention. Somebody at your end has to become the owner of this system: not a programmer, but a person who knows where things are and whom to go to. If there is no such person, in a year the system will start living a life of its own, and that will be fair enough.
How it goes
I look at how the work is really arranged.
Meetings with you and with people from the departments. I need to understand not the diagram but what actually happens, including the workarounds everybody uses and nobody writes down.
I break it into parts and agree the order with you.
First I do what hurts most, not what looks best. The list is agreed in writing.
I put it in piece by piece.
Each piece works on its own and is useful before the whole thing comes together. If the work stops halfway, what you are left with is a working piece, not a building site.
I hand it over to your people.
I show them where things are, how to change them, and what to do when something breaks. Not slide training, but several sessions on your own real tasks.
After that you carry on yourselves, and I am alongside for as long as needed.
I name the timeline after I have looked at the work: it depends on the number of departments and the state of your data.
What happens if I disappear
It is the right question, and at this amount it should be asked out loud.
Everything sits on your server and the access is yours. I hold nothing that I could hold over you. Inside there are ordinary things that many people use, not personal inventions of mine: an outsider will find their way around using the description I leave together with the system.
I run projects personally and take a limited number of projects a year. That means you always talk to me and never to an account manager. It also means I am not a round-the-clock support service. Whatever is critical for you, I identify before the work starts, and I agree with you how it is covered.
There is help after handover, but there is no retainer. If something needs extending or something has broken, you write to me, I price the work and do it. You pay for what is done, not for a month of standing by.
What it looks like in practice
In companies that grew step by step, the systems usually don’t talk to each other. The site is separate, the mail is separate, the accounting is separate, and between them sits a person with a spreadsheet. The knowledge about the product is nowhere at all: it is in the engineers’ heads and in correspondence five years old.
After the work it is arranged differently. Everything sits on the company’s server in one place: the email enters the database by itself, the assistant answers technical questions out of the documentation, and the documentation sits where people find it with words.
It runs at the client and belongs to the client. They pay nothing for using it.
Next
If this is about you, write to me. I start with a half-hour review. After that I look at how the work is arranged and tell you what makes sense to do first and what not to touch at all.
Or ask the assistant on this page. It is built the same way yours will be.
All three fields are required.
Solution Optimal
Ruslan Romanko
Digital workers and working environments that sit on your server and stay yours.