Delivered · solo, full lifecycle
Wholly manual operations — inventory, customer records, billing, quotations and sales history kept on paper. No accurate stock position and no reporting capability.
01Context
A distribution business running entirely on paper and memory. Stock was whatever the last person to walk the floor remembered. Quotations were rewritten from scratch each time. Answering “what did this customer buy last year” meant finding the right ledger. Nothing was wrong with the business — the information simply was not retrievable.
02What was going wrong
03Approach
A single-handed engagement across every phase: requirements gathering, solution design, database design, development, testing, deployment, user training and post-deployment support. Early-career work, and included here because it is the clearest precedent for the operating model the firm now runs on.
In 2017, for this client, a desktop application over a local database was the right answer. Connectivity was unreliable and the users were at fixed workstations. Choosing the boring technology was the correct engineering call.
Delivery included user training and post-deployment support. A system nobody can operate is not delivered, whatever the code does.
04What was built
05Outcome
Manual record-keeping replaced with a centralised digital system: improved record organisation, simplified billing, better inventory visibility and faster retrieval of operational information. Described qualitatively because no performance metrics were captured for this engagement — so none are quoted.
We will walk through the architecture, the constraints and the parts that went wrong — on a call, without a deck.