Client work
A customer system kept running since 2015
The same customer system, maintained and extended for the same client for over a decade, and a new platform now in discovery. The client's name is withheld: it is a real company and BlueWorkz does not have written permission to publish it yet.
The situation
The client sells advertising across a large number of leisure and sports venues. The work sits in the gap a company of that size usually has: enough systems to matter, not enough of them to justify anybody in-house whose job they are.
The current piece of work began with a structured discovery rather than a specification. Fourteen sections of it — and the first three are about how the business makes money, what it sells and where the margin actually is, before a single question about a system.
That order is deliberate, and it is the part of this engagement worth reading. Everything proposed since was chosen against the answers to those three sections.
What we did
The customer system is an open-source CRM carrying a large amount of work on top of it: quotes and orders with the commission arithmetic built in, purchase orders to suppliers, a two-way link to the accounts package, email filed against the record it belongs to, and reporting. It has been upgraded through successive major versions rather than replaced.
Alongside it, a sales tool that turns the advertising inventory into a priced, exportable plan, so a proposal is built from what is actually available rather than from a spreadsheet somebody keeps privately.
What changed
The system has been in continuous service since at least July 2015, which is the date of the oldest uptime record still held for it. Eleven years, one supplier, and no rebuild.
What we would do differently
[PLACEHOLDER] One honest line, and it has to be Dan's. Ticket 869evwx03.