Two projects, Two full time teams

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 30, 2011

Ad Finem is busy buzzing away developing it’s two current big projects; The Risk Manager and The Flightdeck. On top of this we are continually maintaining our good old client base, especially Duplication Centre, who’s business heavily relies on Snowball, a specialist operations management tool developed by Ad Finem. Alongside a reliable contractor who helps with the workload, we’ve set up two seperate teams to develop the two big projects, and also a third team (considting of the two managers) to help manage and research the projects and to maintain existing systems.

We’re also busy with SEO, which is fully managed by our top man Chris “Grey” Studzinski, who’s reliably keeping our clients at the top of Google.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not open to new projects! We’re currently recruiting a new programmer and are always looking for interesting projects with interesting clients that push our team to come up with new ideas!

Risk Manager; A Facilities Management System

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 30, 2011

OGS Risk Manager

The Risk Manager is a client facing portal that allows Optimum Group Services, a Facilities Management company, to manage their clients infrastructure. The system integrates with OGS’s Maximo system, an industry standard system, and supplements Maximo by adding functionality and by allowing OGS’s clients to log in and view vital information about their assets.

Ad Finem is an active participent in OGS’s internal meetings with clients such as one of the worlds leading data centre companies. The meetings determined the scope and functionality of the Risk Manager and ensure that it met the needs of the end users, while becoming a streamlined tool within OGS’s business.

Ad Finem continue to develop the tool on an ongoing basis.

 

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The Flightdeck, Social Media Monitoring Tool

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

The Flightdeck logo

Havas Group

A leading global advertising
and communications services group.
Cake Group

An ideas company that make brands
become part of peoples lives.
EHS 4D Group

Three specialist businesses, each producing outstanding work that makes a measurable difference to clients businesses.

The Flightdeck screenshot

The Flightdeck is a Social Media Monitoring tool that was developed by Ad Finem for Havas owned agencies Cake and EHS 4D Group. It is a portal that allows Havas clients to monitor their brand within the social media sphere. The Flightdeck is unique in that it has been designed specifically for Hava’s clients, who’s requirements differ from the needs of other social media monitoring applications. The Flightdeck can be said to be an “inside tool for brand managers”. Havas have identified that generic social media monitoring tools do not provide managers with the complete information that they require, and that they do not package it in the correct format. The Flightdeck takes the conventionally available material, supplements it with additional data, creates key metrics, and packages the information in a format that is ideal for Havas clients. No other social media monitoring tool utilises such an “insider” design.

Ad Finem’s role

Ad Finem continue to be the sole code developers of The Flightdeck. Additionally our managers have integrated with Cake and EHS to form the design team which carries out research and new ideas to develop the system.

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Logistical Control

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

LHT Logistics control system
LHT Logistics are another favourite client that arrived to us through word of mouth and for whom we developed a slick operations management system. Primarily involved in freight, LHT also provide “cloud warehousing” for their clients. LHT’s clients wanted visibility on their virtually held stock and the ability to despatch their stock direct to their end customers via an online system. Ad Finem fully designed and developed a bespoke system to do this, and much more.

The system helped organise LHT’s warehouse, reduced the possibility of lost stock and helped automate their business processes. It included automated billing functionality, and purpose developed tools for batch processing stock.

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Snowball; Operations Management System (includes kitchen sink)

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

Snowball Operations Management System

Snowball is a totally bespoke CRM, eCRM, Accounting, and Operations Management System developed for Duplication Centre.

Ad Finem has worked with Duplication Centre for six years, starting from a flat website, then adding e-commerce, and expanding to the most advanced operations management system in the industry. By far! An account of the relationship between Ad Finem and Duplication Centre can be found on their website, and details how the companies worked together to make Duplication Centre the industry leader in the UK.

The aim of Snowball was to automate the business. The system requires virtually no updating by staff and carries out most task automatically. Features include:

  • Automated CRM
  • Order management
  • Integration with the company warehouse system
  • Invoicing (fully automated)
  • Invoice chasing (automated!)
  • Prospect management and sales (automated!)
  • eCRM (semi automated)
  • Book Keeping (sadly not yet automated)
  • Product Management
  • Integration with Google Shopping, Parcelforce, Postcode lookup (PAC), Google Checkout, Google Apps

And lots more!

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Sparkle; bespoke eBay management

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

Project Sparkle is one of those remarkably simple systems that just works extraordinarily well. It may seem that we claim that all of our systems work well, but actually, the reason for that is that not every business can be automated, and we generally give our customers a realistic and objective opinion on whether the system will work well or even pay for itself before we start.

eComputers are an eBay power seller that sell a lot of laptops. The business is small, consisting of one man and his helper, and a lot of their time was taken up with invoicing, reconciling payments, and copying data across to their three systems. That was until we developed Sparkle. Sparkle now sits in the middle of their three systems: their eBay control panel, their UPS despatch system, and their Sage book keeping system. It automates the processing of orders across all three systems and keeps them all updated with very little user intervention.

Sparkle is now three years old and is a mature system that chugs away every day without failure. What’s remarkably surprising is that no one has yet developed a usable off-the-shelf system to replace it! Our three year old bespoke system is still ahead of the competition and we’re not even updating it.

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Flat websites & mini tools?

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

With all the large projects that we’ve been slaving away at for the past year, we’ve been asking ourselves whether we still want to do simple “flat” websites and small applications? And do we still work with the little man who’s starting a new business?

We still have a large client base that dates back to our early days when we worked with startups we’re still maintaining their websites. Tad Moyseowicz of TM Photography was our first ever customer. To this day he pays the same web hosting prices as he did back in ’03, and at this very moment we’re in discussions with him to update his photography website and back end control panel.

Billy Westerby, our old friend from E-Computers, may consistently and insistently spoil our lovely designs through dodgy use of Microsoft Frontpage, but we still maintain his bespoke eBay management system which saves him hours of management time every day.

Why do we still work with small businesses? These small businessed consistently supported us through the early forming days of our company. And secondly, although our hourly rate may have gone up, our skills have also gone up. We now work much faster and can do small and mid sized systems with our eyes closed; so asking us to do a simple e-commerce system doesn’t use much of our resources at all. The result is that end prices have not changed much at all over the years.

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The Price Calculator; Dynamic E-Commerce

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

Mixam ScreenshotThe Price Calculator that we did for Mixam wasn’t anything new. We’d already done one for Duplication Centre, and it was such a hit that over the years it went through three major revisions and, had half a dozen requests for similar tools, and Xpress CDs even illegally stole our code. The Mixam calculator has a very colourful design and a smart back end system that accurately calculates the cost of printing jobs.

What’s unique about our Price Calculators over a regular price “wizard” is that they dynamically calculate the price in a graphical environment; users click and watch the price being calculated without leaving the page.

Both systems integrate with a full back end operations management system, and the Duplication Centre system utilises a selection of payment systems, address lookup, trade access functionality, and a product encyclopedia.

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Veritas Foundation; Newspaper Portal & E-Commerce

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

Veritas BookshopThe Veritas tri-project was one of those projects that we love to do. Did it push us? No. Did it use any fancy new technology? No. It was one of those projects that we’ve done dozens of;  the outcome of which was quick development, excellent design work, and one happy client.

Veritas Foundation are a Polish benevolent organisation set up in 1947 to support the Polish community that settled in London after the war. The foundation operates a specialist book shop and a well established community newspaper. Ad Finem was brought in to look at the foundations requirements, advise, develop, and deploy the system.

We developed a slick online shop at www.veritasfoundation.co.uk/bookshop and a professional newspaper portal at www.veritasfoundation.co.uk/gazetaniedzielna, which allows Veritas to post articles, imagery, and inportant information. The two systems integrate with each other seamlessly, with the newspaper portal displaying products from the bookshop, and both sites linking across to each other. Both portals are easily managed by Veritas themselves through an easy to use control panel.

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The Artwork Creator – One of a kind?

Posted by philip.antoniou on March 29, 2011

The Artwork Creator

When we built it there was nothing like it around. Some big company had done an online imaging tool, but it was complex and they probably had something like 50 times the resources and budget that we had.

The Artwork Creator is a simple online tool that allows users to create artwork online, with no software and only basic internet skills. It was developed for Duplication Centre’s customers who didn’t want to commission a professional designer to create their artwork, and didn’t have professional software to do it themselves or didn’t have the skills to use it. Such customers had a software gap that the Artwork Creator filled. Unlike other companies design “wizards”, the Artwork Creator works like a proper design app with a workspace and selection of tools. Try it!

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