Quite often we find as a development shop the need from our clients to ‘plug gaps!’. These tend to come from our corporate customers who have company wide core systems but find gaps in functionality or management information. This facilitates a need for a tactical interim solution until such time the core system can be improved, if indeed it ever will.
Large corporations roll out brand new turbo charged strategic core systems from time to time. It will revolutionise processes, it will amalgamate several systems into one, it will be bigger, faster, accessible anywhere, and even make the tea and buy you a beer maybe after work. And they do (most of the time) and if it has been really well scoped the requirements of the new system will be delivered on time and hopefully in budget.
But the issue is the inevitable 5-10% of functionality that has been missed. Usually, some of that 10% will be showstoppers to business operations. This can be through not making phase 1 of the strategic rollout or simply it will never be possible to incorporate it into the new system. Gaps are left as a result – sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent.
The gaps tend to sit at departmental level, and due to the needs of a few they may never make the cut for subsequent development phases. So what is the solution? The department had the ability to do this before, to run that regular MI from the old system, so what happens now if the new system cannot provide it?
The first stage is – can we grab the data out of the new system and even if we can how can we recreate our existing functionality without having someone working this manually in Excel for several costly hours per week?
This is where Juchau-Thorpe can help. We can liaise with the relevant parties within your business to source the data, we can then replicate the missing functionality to provide equivalent solutions. We can recommend the technology needed, or if a restriction exists from your IT department we can even create departmental solutions using the Microsoft Office suite.
If you have gaps and have lost functionality through gaining big benefits elsewhere, rather than think of manual solutions, think about contacting us for some advice on what could be done to plug that gap.