What sets us apart from our competition is ... quality and consistency of service.

Because we have been in business for such a long time now, and we bring more than sixty years’ professional experience to everything we do, we “take the long view” about our business and about our relationship with our customers.   (Read More...)

We offer these services, among others ...

Office Automation and Data Handling/Analysis for Practical Benefit:

Most offices have copies of the Microsoft Office® suite installed (or some open-source equivalent) ... and it is barely being used.   Sometimes, very large amounts of data are being managed, more or less, by hand.   Things that could be automated or streamlined, to the very great benefit of day-to-day office productivity ... are not.   Because nobody knows how.   We do know how.   We know how to improve processes in pragmatic, practical ways that pay for themselves quickly.   We know how to make the computers that you have, work much harder for you than they presently do.   We don’t set out to make your existing business processes “dramatically different,” just “dramatically better.”   Sometimes, a small but well-chosen, well-focused improvement can make all the difference.   And sometimes, the computer can do a thing in a matter of seconds, that might take hours or days of human effort.

Software Condition and Strategy Assessments:

Most of the time, our customers engage us because they have some piece of existing software that most-decidedly isn’t “doing what they want.”   Their immediate question (and, certainly, ours) is, “what are my realistic options, what should I do now, and how much might it cost?”   All perfectly reasonable questions.   And, questions that we (of course...) don’t have immediate answers to.   (Customers who are contemplating entirely-new projects are basically in the same situation, and we do not profess to have immediate answers for them, either.)   But we know how to find out:   methodical, objective, un-biased research.   (Read More...)

Software Design, Development, Maintenance and Repair:

One of our most popular services is the design, development, maintenance, and repair of computer software, because we know how to deliver consistent results where others consistently fail.   We design systems both for individual sites and for large clusters.   We maintain and repair the systems built by others.   The programming tool that we most-often employ for this purpose is Perl, although we have worked extensively in C/C++, Python, Java, dot-NET, and a very long list of other tools and languages; database systems (SQL and otherwise); and reporting and simulation tools.   (Read More...)

On-Site and Off-Site Project Management:

We can provide effective project-management services, coordinating the efforts of on-site and off-site vendors, providing independent quality assurance, acceptance and validation testing, and assisting where possible in the diagnosis of technical issues.   Within the United States, we can provide periodic on-site services, as well.   (Read More...)

Business Process Automation:

In spite of the extraordinary powers of the digital computer in the workplace, most business procedures concerning those computers are performed ... by hand.   They are carried out by “key personnel” who have, through trial-and-error, learned to correctly perform the (probably, undocumented) routine procedure.   Processes which may involve a large amount of computation nevertheless also involve fairly-constant human intervention ... and so, human error.

While it is unrealistic to “completely eliminate the human factor” from every process and procedure, we nevertheless find that there are usually many ways to substantially reduce both the degree of “routine” human involvement in those processes, and thus, the opportunity for human error.   (Let’s face it:   all of us prefer to be able to sleep through the night, without worrying about the pager going off ... again.)

Business Intelligence Research:

The electronic records that you have accumulated over the course of many years can be a gold-mine of information.   The Internet is an ever-changing trove of additional information to which it can be compared.   But “there is no silver bullet.”   Our offerings in this domain combine savvy use of statistical analysis with good, old-fashioned “gumshoe” detective work, providing confidential, made-to-order research products of immediate and lasting business value.

Automated Recovery of Application Understanding, for Arbitrarily-Large Production Systems:

Even a “modest” business application might easily consist of thousands of individual source-files, and might involve a data platform containing hundreds of database tables and an equal number of non-database files.   Software components in such a system might be activated by batch-jobs, remote procedure call (RPC) transactions, and interactive screens, all at the same time!   “So, how does one make sense of something as complicated as that?”

We know how to comb through your entire application, automatically, to build a complete picture of the data-flow and control-flow dependencies throughout the system.   We know how to build tools that can apply this information in ways that you might have never thought possible, allowing you to make system changes (and to recover from “abends”) with a confidence that you’ve never had before.  

Technical Writing and Custom Training Materials:

We have designed and built professional software applications exceeding 350,000 original source-lines, and have developed more than 500 pages of online documentation to accompany the same.   We use the DocBook (XML) file format for this purpose, which allows us to easily excerpt and publish the materials simultaneously in PDF and Windows HTML-Help formats.   One of our principals has been a professional trainer, and a community-college instructor and (full semester) course developer.

If you'd like to know more about our professional services, please contact us.