Model it exactly as it is

The simplest concept, yet a majority of software vendors fall over right out the gate. Their software designs take in real world events and then immediately throw away critical data. We use event sourcing, which preserves not only the data but the meaning behind the data. It is a transformative approach.

When we walk you through an event storming session, you will see your business in a new light. You will also see how simple the resulting software could be. Event sourcing lets us capture the data once and automatically update all the other systems you need to deal with, easily and efficiently.

Let's briefly dive into how this works.

Everything is either an event or an effect

Something happens in your business. A sale. An inquiry. Anything. We capture the fact of that thing happening with an event. Once the software has the facts, it acts. That event travels through the software and produces one or more effects, a change that reflects immediately anywhere you need it to. The effect might be an email, inventory update, text message...anything.

Even better is that multiple effects can happen in parallel by the nature of the design: an inventory count might be updated while at the same time the website is changed, or an email is sent while marking a customer record a certain way. There is one core set of events that represent what's happening in your business, and there are the effects that come from those events. This is the entirety of the approach.

What is an event?

An event is the record of something having happened. It consists of a name (i.e., Order Placed) and a payload (the data representing the order). Events are immutable, they never change. While this may sound highly technical, you will experience a revelation when you see the events flowing through your software. It is very powerful to see these events and understand they are the building blocks of everything your software does for you.

Working this way means your software can scale with you. It is easy to add new events and effects, and all changes can be made retroactively. You might decide a year into your new system that you need to react differently to orders over a certain dollar amount. Or maybe you want to know what day of the week you often run out of certain items. You could decide to do or report on anything it might be impossible to know on day one. These changes are easy with event sourcing, which means they are easy to bring to your business.

There are many other benefits that have to do with resiliency and maintainability. Concepts often lost with smaller business because of the time and effort it takes to deal with edge cases that shouldn't even be possible. Our design approach ensures only what's possible will happen, thereby reducing potential failures to almost nothing.

We are confident you will want to work with us when you see all that you get from our software.

Why custom software?

With hundreds of off the shelf software solutions available, why would we recommend  custom software? There are ready-made, even free solutions for just about anything your business might need to do.

Simply put,  none of that software was written for you.  While it may give you a  majority  of what you need, it will never deliver the insights or clarity you get from our software, because our software demonstrably captures your unique business.

Here is another way to look at it.

Image depicting events at the center and other software as spokes.

Start small

Maybe you've been in business for a while and already have 4 or 5 software systems with which you interact. You've reached an uneasy truce with them: you have some workflows that get the job done. We can start small by bridging systems together. By tying together systems with some basic automation, what used to take three steps is now one.

We can then start providing facades over complicated processes. Maybe your CRM has dozens of form fields for customers. You only use a handful of those, but then again that CRM wasn't written for you. It's trying to be everything to everyone. We can provide a simplified customer update process that handles the CRM behind the scenes; you use the simple interface and let the rest worry about itself.

Before you know it, you've modeled a vast majority of your day to day operations in a way that you could explain to anyone very easily. You can literally pull up an event stream and watch your business unfold, from anywhere.

You also get portability for free. Maybe there's a different CRM you've been wanting to try, but you couldn't fathom doing the work to move between systems. Once we start capturing events, it will be easy to evaluate different solutions. We can keep your existing CRM up to date while at the same time populating a new one for you to evaluate, with minimal effort. No complicated update processes to your existing software to produce new output. The events we've designed naturally lend themselves to multiple purposes.

You can go from an event to anything else, but you can't always go the other way.

Capturing your data as events means you're free to explore different software systems without fear of being locked in. There's no better way to work.