Solutions for Critical Capabilities

Our organization specializes in, and is aligned with your businesses critical capabilities and business roadmaps. We drive solutions and drive change in order to allow your organization to execute well on your capabilities.

We work in various disciplines to ensure organizations have the proper solutions in place to successfully deliver on their businesses stated capabilities and meet their business objectives.  Below are examples of some of the work we have done across enterprise capabilities impacting business units on all sides of the enterprise.

Worked with one of Canada’s largest and leading retailers to create solution architecture for their new Enterprise Reverse Flow initiative which consolidated returns to a single returns centre for all of their companies. This required working with multiple business teams in different facets of the enterprise to create a solution which would integrate and work across 6 different operating units with completely different system landscapes, multiple ERPs, and handling use cases for e-commerce and store returns, including, shipping/ASN to returns centre, claims, receiving, return to vendor, ship to warehouse, shortfall billing, recycle, destroy, and recall.

Architected and lead the software development on an enterprise solution for manufacturers to track and manage their inventory from receiving raw material and components, to WIP (work-in-progress) inventory, and finished assemblies. As part of these initiatives, hand held scanners were deployed and connected to APIs on a scalable server architecture to track movement, usage, and inventory of bins, parts, and raw material across the facilities.

Another Supply Chain project required the creation of integration architecture for a large warehouse transformation project involving Manhattan Warehouse (WMOS) and a mix of other state of the art and legacy custom developed applications.

Contracted by one of Canada’s leading insurance providers to stabilize a previously unstable custom developed enterprise solution that was in-flight. We contributed design and architecture to a multiyear $40M program, and we lead the development effort in various capacities and defined metrics and KPIs for the stakeholders to see, in real time, the progress our architecture, re-designs, refactoring, and technical direction had on the custom developed enterprise application. Up to 80 project team members (onshore and offshore) were influenced by our work and technical guidance which allowed the organization to move from an unstable buggy solution that didn’t perform well to a stable, fast, and production ready solution; we had the KPIs and measurements to prove our results. This solution is innovative and is designed to dramatically increase sales or group benefit insurance plans to businesses while providing new flexibility for underwriters to assess risk and override the defined risk provisions built into the system

We’ve worked on multiple insurance group benefit projects for multiple major life and group benefits insurance companies in Canada. Solutions include planning, and technical and strategic migration to new platforms as well as completely net new groundbreaking solutions to provide a brand new paradigm to what is typically an archaic industry (system wise).

Contracted by a new startup to architect and create a 100,000 product online B2B and B2C computer supplies online store. Developed a technical road map for the client, and we worked together on procuring a service provider to host the store. The client accepted our strategic direction on using the Shopify Enterprise platform. We developed a relationship with Synnex and Ingram Micro and built integrations to them from our custom developed Azure cloud platform to pull in product, pricing, and availability data. The custom architected and developed Azure platform did analytics and aggregation on the data before sending it up to Shopify. Integration to GFK Etilize was also performed for product data information used on the Shopify site. Customizations were added to allow the site administrator to add promos and selectively change the drop shipping provider on orders depending on each wholesalers price at the time.

In addition to this solution, we’ve partnered with a ten billion dollar major Canadian retailer to architect a set of solutions to facilitate product sales in new international markets.

We’ve architected and built custom developed application using modern software design patterns and effective modular design for the enterprise to facilitate faster iterative product development and product specification master data

Evaluated multiple vendors (SaaS and on-premise) to deliver non-merchandise procurement capabilities in the enterprise. Ultimately, we recommended a SaaS provider, and once the platform was approved by the business stakeholders, we architected the final target state of the solution with all constraints and technical considerations, including, integrations with existing on-premise ERP solutions as well as playing a pivotal role in on-going strategic architecture and technical direction.

Supplier scorecards are important across many industries for supply performance evaluation. We’ve architected and developed full scorecard BI solutions from scratch for the enterprise across multiple industries.

Lead the architecture, technical requirements, development, and implementation for shop floor solutions across various manufacturing facilities across North America

QA is a critical capability across almost every industry. We’ve architected, developed, and implement industry leading “gold standard” QA solutions across industries from Manufacturing QA to Software QA. From leading the architecture on QA modules to be included as part of enterprise leading SDLC SaaS platform offerings to building and architecting custom manufacturing QA specification, destruction, testing, tracking, and reporting enterprise solutions used by manufacturers to reliably track and trend on their QA data and identify trends with QA results with predictive analytics in relation to results, trends, and tolerances, we understand the importance of QA and reliability very well across many industries

As part of inventory management, we automated an existing functional manual card based Kanban solution which involved custom developed software running on handheld mobile devices, electronic signalling, and replacement of old fashioned kanban boards with large LCD screens in key areas of the shop floor and held all together by a properly designed versatile back end with advanced BI reporting on the data. This solution started for a single line on the shop floor and after proving it’s value and effectiveness was deployed across the other lines throughout the entire 1.1 million square foot facility

Proper processes, and systems need to be in place to effectively onboard and manage personnel. We’ve provided strategic direction on HR Management solutions and software vendors as well as architected and built HR systems that augment existing solutions to ensure organizations can fully execute on their HR Management capabilities. This includes custom training tracking and compliance, employee hierarchy, organization charts, reporting, and integrating HR data from various large ERP solutions to a multitude of downstream applications. PIPEDA, PII, and GDPR always come into play when dealing with this type of data, and so we are vigilant and ensure that the proper controls, usage, governance, and security of the data is up to a high level of standard.

Implemented solutions for the medical transcription industry and healthcare. Our solutions have interfaced with the biggest providers of electronic dictation and transcription solutions in the world. We’ve developed core applications that can be used standalone by major hospitals as well as as add-ons to existing out of the box solutions to augment their functionality with record retention and storage, contract management, and automatic billing and invoicing. The custom components were implemented at a major transcription operation in Canada with hundreds of North American hospitals interfacing with the solution, including The Mayo Clinic and John Hopkins Hospital

Contracted to work with a leading PR firm to architect, design, and execute on the implementation new development features into their leading PR portal used by top public companies around the globe.

We are agile, and have been working in Agile since our conception and have refined our own agile processes towards software development as well as for our clients. We’ve also been contracted by a boutique consulting firm to work with a seasoned agile leader and practitioner and ensure we maintained a highly functional disciplined agile team. Our company, Douglas Information Systems Corporation, has been cited in Gil Broza’s (one of the top leading Agile experts in Canada) book, “The Human Side of Agile”.

Architected and built custom enterprise PLM solutions from scratch for the manufacturing industry taking into account the very specific business requirements the industry had in order to give a competitive advantage for product iteration.

We have also been contracted to work with a major $10B Canadian retailer to architect PLM in their enterprise for national owned brand products. This includes technical evaluation of different PLM vendor options to ensure technical suitability and fit and ensuring the successful architecture of the entire program and it’s relationship to all facets of the enterprise.

Architected and lead the software development effort of custom, award winning, business development tools to enable the business to fuel it’s growth by having access to important decision making data and analytics in order to make informed choices much faster, execute much faster, and make better decisions as related to vendor selection, ROI, and new business initiatives.

We’ve built enterprise training solutions that augment existing HR management systems to capture industry specific and regulatory requirements.

We’ve also made very specific recommendations to other customers who have asked for custom training solutions to be built where we have, as strategic guidance, urged them to consider the options in their existing ERP platforms. This strategic direction changed the paradigm of the customer, and they were up and running very quickly with a suitable HR Training Management solution without the cost and lead time of custom development that, in this case, wouldn’t have provided then with a strategic advantage for their business.

As consultants, we maintain positive relationships with our clients which is effective in driving business and growth. However, we’ve also worked with other small consulting companies in which we have driven mutually beneficial consulting opportunities that have allowed our client partner to procure new business as well.

Managing part, raw material, and bill of material is crucial for manufacturing enterprises. We’ve architected and built custom software solutions for multiple manufacturers that allow them to effectively utilize raw materials as well as being able to manage part and BOM information.

Architected vendor management solutions for multiple industries, including the consolidation and mastering of vendor data between while taking into account the multiple facets of the organization which use “vendor”. Architected and built API services for these vendors to be consumed, in-line with enterprise and software architecture best practices, by consumer applications that require the use of mastered vendor data.

Additionally, we’ve consulted on and interfaced with enterprise technical leaders who are driving vendor management capabilities across the enterprise of a large $10B retailer. Provided assessment and strategic options to help ensure vendor management capabilities would be compatible with the introduction of solutions our company was architecting for the enterprise as related to ERP, product management, and sourcing.