Building materials
Documenting the undocumentable
Years of Excel macros and MS Access reverse-engineered into the first complete blueprint of the business anyone had produced — then a phased migration, and a compromised estate rebuilt and secured.
Client
A legacy building materials supplier
1st
complete blueprint of their processes
The challenge
What was in the way
Financial reporting ran on a web of Excel macros and MS Access built by a succession of employees over many years, wired into a Ponderosa ERP.
Nobody understood the whole thing. It broke regularly, could not be scaled, and could not be replaced because no one knew what it did. Separately, their public website had been compromised.
The solution
What we built
We reverse-engineered and documented the entire business logic — the first complete blueprint of their own processes anyone had produced — and used it to design a phased migration to a cloud data platform with a modern BI layer. That migration is approved and underway.
Meanwhile we stabilised the system they still depend on, because the alternative was asking them to stop reporting.
On the security side we closed the breaches, hardened the infrastructure, rebuilt and redesigned the website on our own cloud, and migrated everything across. E-commerce ordering and quoting are in development, along with two assistants — one internal, one customer-facing.
Key technologies
- Legacy
- Excel/VBA, MS Access, Ponderosa ERP
- Target
- Cloud data platform, Superset or Metabase
- Web
- Full redesign, security hardening, cloud migration
Impact & results
A critical business risk documented and de-risked
The reporting logic is now written down.
A phased modernisation path
That does not require a big-bang cutover.
Security restored
And the public estate rebuilt on hardened infrastructure.
Start here
Start with a problem, not a brief.
Tell us what is slow, what is manual, what is stalled, or what nobody understands any more. We will tell you honestly whether it is worth building.