Custom software

Bespoke applications and data systems for asset-intensive operations, built by people who have run the workshops and written the studies. You will not spend the first six weeks explaining what an FMECA is.

Most of this work exists for the same reason: the EAM was never going to hold the thing in question, so a spreadsheet grew up beside it, and now the spreadsheet is load-bearing.

The spreadsheet that became infrastructure

Every site has one. It started as somebody's working file. It now drives a decision that matters. It has a formula in column AK that nobody living understands, no history, no backup worth the name, and two people are quietly maintaining divergent copies of it. The person who built it moved to another role in 2021.

Replacing it is rarely technically hard. The hard part is working out what decision it actually supports, which bits are load-bearing, and which bits are residue from a process that changed three years ago and nobody pruned. That is the part we are useful for, and it is why we scope this work by sitting next to the person who uses the thing, watching them use it.

Data extraction, cleansing and migration

Getting reliability-relevant data out of SAP PM, Maximo or Ellipse in a usable shape is its own small discipline. The data is in there. It is also spread across tables designed for transactions, coded inconsistently across a decade of different people, and padded with records that are technically valid and analytically worthless.

Migrations are the acute version. A cut-over moves the asset master and the open work, because those are what stop the plant on Monday if you get them wrong. Reliability history gets truncated or dropped, because nobody owns it and nothing breaks that week. If a migration is on your roadmap, deal with this before it. Afterwards is considerably more expensive and occasionally impossible.

Reporting that does not need rebuilding monthly

A genuinely depressing amount of reliability-engineer time goes on rebuilding the same report from the same sources every month, by hand, with the same three copy-paste errors. It is a solvable problem, and solving it is usually the fastest way to prove a system is worth having, because it hands a measurable number of hours back to someone who is visibly short of them.

How we build

Beside your existing systems. The EAM stays the system of record for the asset master, the work orders and the cost history; what we build holds what it cannot. Integration is by defined interface. We would rather read from your systems than ask a human being to key anything twice.

Your data stays exportable in a documented format. Software built for a single site has an obvious failure mode, which is that the vendor becomes a dependency. We are the vendor. The honest mitigation is that leaving is possible, and we would rather say that than promise you will never want to.

We scope in writing, fixed-price where the work can honestly be fixed-priced, and we build in increments that are each useful on their own. If the first increment does not earn the second, you have found that out cheaply.

When the answer is not custom software

If what you want is a defensible home for criticality and the reasoning behind the plan, that one is solved and rebuilding it from scratch is a poor use of your budget — see Stannar, the reliability system of record that sits beside SAP, Maximo and Ellipse. And if the real gap is the analysis rather than the tooling, see FMECA facilitation and maintenance strategy review. We would rather tell you that at the scoping call than three months into a build.