Engineering governance · the IDEA framework
Four stages, each with a gate and a deliverable. Nothing gets built until the data design is signed off.
The IDEA framework
We sit with floor staff, find the spreadsheets nobody mentions, and locate the real bottleneck rather than its symptoms.
We model the data, user permissions and approval rules on paper before anything is configured or coded.
We set up environments, configure modules, build the integrations and run trial migrations you can check.
With clean data in one place, we automate the paperwork around it, with a person approving anything above your limits.
Approach maps
Pick your engagement type, then open any stage.
ERP, CRM, accounting, inventory and other core business systems
We sit with the people doing the work and map how orders, stock and money actually move today, including the spreadsheets nobody mentions in the first meeting.
Critical spreadsheets that management does not know staff rely on.
We design the data model, roles, approval rules and integrations on paper before anything is configured.
Sales and warehouse asking for conflicting things mid-build.
We provision environments, configure the standard modules to the blueprint, and build any approved extensions.
Configuration drifting away from what was agreed in the blueprint.
We extract customers, vendors, products and balances from your current tools, remove duplicates and load trial datasets you can check.
Bad legacy data being carried into the new system on day one.
We connect the system to the tools that stay: banks, e-commerce stores, payroll, shipping and anything else agreed in the blueprint.
Silent sync failures that nobody notices until month-end.
Your staff test real scenarios in staging and learn the system role by role, with recorded guides they can return to.
Staff meeting the system for the first time on go-live day.
We freeze the old system, move the final changes across, verify opening balances and switch over, usually across a weekend.
Downtime during trading hours.
The team that built the system stays on it after go-live: fixing issues on the day they surface, adjusting screens staff struggle with, and sitting with finance through the first month-end close.
Early friction pushing staff back to the old spreadsheets.
With clean data in one system, we automate the repetitive work around it: invoice capture, reorder drafts, approval routing and alerts.
The new system settling into a passive record-keeping tool.
Agents, document processing and workflow automation
We watch the manual process end to end and measure how often it runs, how long it takes and where it goes wrong.
Automating a process that should have been removed instead.
We rank every automation candidate by return and feasibility so you fund the ones that pay back first.
Spending on automations with no measurable return.
We define triggers, knowledge sources, confidence thresholds and the points where a human must approve.
An agent taking an action in front of a customer that nobody approved.
We build the connectors, load your documents and policies into the knowledge base and integrate with the systems it acts on.
Rate limits and expired credentials breaking the flow.
The automation runs alongside your team on real work without taking any external action, so we can compare its decisions with theirs.
Real-world inputs the test set did not cover.
The automation goes live with a human approving low-confidence cases and monitoring switched on.
Silent failures going unnoticed.
We tune thresholds as volume grows and move to the next item on the opportunity map.
Accuracy drifting as your business changes.
Custom applications, portals and websites
We pin down who uses the software, what they need to get done and what must be true on launch day.
Building features nobody asked for.
We design the key screens and put a clickable prototype in front of real users before any production code is written.
Discovering usability problems after the build.
We choose the stack, design the data model and agree the hosting and security approach.
Expensive rewrites caused by early architectural shortcuts.
Two-week sprints, each ending in a working build you can use.
Surprises at the end of a long build.
Regression testing, performance checks and a security review before anything goes public.
Launching with a vulnerability or a broken core flow.
Production deployment, monitoring and a planned rollback path.
A launch-day failure with no way back.
Fixes, small improvements and the next set of features based on real usage.
Software decaying after launch.
Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and custom stores
We audit products, variants, images, customers and order history to see what can move as-is and what needs cleaning.
Losing search rankings through broken URLs.
We design the product, collection, cart and checkout pages around how your customers buy.
A checkout that loses mobile buyers.
We build the theme and store features with Core Web Vitals checked on every template.
A slow store that search engines and buyers both penalise.
We move products, customers and order history and verify counts against the source.
Missing variants or prices after migration.
We configure payment gateways, tax rules and shipping carriers for the markets you sell into.
Wrong tax or shipping charges on live orders.
DNS switch, redirects live, and order monitoring through the first days of trading.
Orders lost during the switch.
Ongoing conversion work: testing changes to product pages, cart and checkout against real traffic.
A store that never improves after launch.
Annual maintenance and SLA-backed support
We get access, audit the system as it stands and list the risks we find, whether or not we built it.
Taking on a system with unknown problems.
We document configuration, integrations and runbooks so support never depends on one person's memory.
Knowledge locked in one engineer's head.
Tickets handled against the response times in your plan, with monthly reporting.
Issues sitting unowned.
We review ticket trends and recommend what to fix at the root or improve next.
Paying to fix the same issue every month.
Governance
What you can check at any point, without waiting for a status meeting.
Code, migration scripts and infrastructure configuration are committed to a repository you can see throughout the build.
After go-live, the engineers who built the system stay on it for four weeks to answer questions, tune thresholds and fix edge cases.
Client work · published with client consent
Read how we ran real projects: the problem, the system we built and what changed, each published with the client's written consent.
Next step
A 30-minute call with a systems architect. We outline what discovery would cover for you.
First call: 30 minutes · A senior consultant, not a sales rep
