Ditching many many spreadsheets in favour of a comprehensive platform to manage place and monitor our orders.
How the team at Bettr Software helped Companies Management Systems Ltd ditch their many many spreadsheets and manual tracking and tracing of orders and replaced it with a bespoke platform to manage place and monitor orders.
The Dream
Companies Management Systems Ltd procurement for materials and IT in the construction industry. Their spreadsheet based system has become cumbersome & needed an online system to manage procurement from start to finish.
The Challenge
The placement & monitoring of orders for the construction industry can be extremely complex at times, their current spreadsheet system was know very well by Danny & the team at CMS. However such a system is complex, CMS needed somebody who knew what questions to ask & when in order to take the system they had in their mind & turn it into a functioning web based system.
The Process
We worked with CMS in bi-weekly chunks of work, starting with only those features that would be critical to the usefulness of the system.
We worked closely with Danny to estimate the effort vs reward of the features that could be beneficial & allowed Danny to set the priority.
Every 2 weeks, we reviewed progress on the tasks & re-prioritised the remaining features.
Progress was measured only in working software, every 2 weeks (if not more often) CMS would have working software in front of them which then could test & feedback upon.
The Outcome
“We can now ditch the many many spreadsheets and manual trace and tracking or orders 🥳🥳🥳, we can also communicate to site teams and allow them to monitor via status changes the process of their order. We can also take this all the way to the invoicing stage and manage the payment of these with importing all the relevant information to our accounting software.
The ability to track & place these orders in one place has saved us countless man-hours. We now have critical data & reports at our fingertips which are crucial for optimisations & cost-savings.”
“We couldn't ask for better support or faster resolution to our issues. I would recommend Bettr Software to anyone looking for any type of web or app design”
— Danny Mc Cready - Companies Management Systems Ltd
Things Change. Plans Change. Don’t get too attached to that 20 page brief.
We don’t believe in huge documents that outline everything tiny thing that needs to be done. Things change. What’s important today may not be important tomorrow. Instead we keep things simple & even a little vague to being with we will dive into the details of only the most important features at any given point in time, when that feature is fresh in your mind & relevant to you.
As an added bonus this way of working means you don’t need to write that 20 page brief.