Bespoke Software

What we take on

Most work here is product: Opcela Quality, deployed and configured for a site. Bespoke work is the rest, taken request by request, and it is the part of a process that no product bought off a shelf is shaped like.

The work named below is work already built once, in Opcela Quality, for a site that needed it:

• Reading a process that is already instrumented. Tag values by OPC-UA subscription, from one or more servers, with the tags found by browsing the server rather than typed in by hand.
• Writing a value back to a tag, to hold an interlock or to release one.
• Making two systems that cannot talk to each other exchange something, and interlock on it.
• Accounting for downtime that nothing on site accounts for today.
• Approvals, sign-offs and reports that currently live in a spreadsheet and an email thread, with a document trail somebody can follow months later.
• Telling a named person by email, SMS or WhatsApp, with reminders and an escalation to a second person when the first does not answer.
• Software the people on the floor can open in a browser, rather than a thick client on one machine in an office.

It is written to run the way the product runs: as containers, on hardware you own, one tenant per site, with access by role and a record of every change that cannot be edited afterwards.

What we do not take on

• The control layer. Opcela is the software company. Programmable logic, safety and drive logic, panel work and instrumentation stay with whoever holds them today, and we build to what they expose.
• A quality system Opcela Quality already covers. That is the product, configured for your site. It is a shorter route than anything written from nothing, and we will say so.
• Work nobody on site can spend time on. The discovery is done in the room, and the one condition below is the whole of what it asks for.

How an engagement runs

Six stages, in this order, and each one leaves you holding something. Nothing moves to the next until the one before it is agreed.

1. 01

   Discovery

   In person, on your site, by somebody who understands what they are looking at rather than somebody who needs the process explained before they can ask the right question. What comes back is what your site actually needs, written down.

2. 02

   Specification

   What is being built, tag by tag: the values it reads, the conditions it acts on, who is told and how, and what it does when it cannot reach something. Nothing is built until you have agreed it.

3. 03

   Build

   Written by the same people who build Opcela Quality, on the same stack it runs on. There is nobody in between, so what you described in the specification is what gets built.

4. 04

   Factory acceptance test

   Run before anything goes near your line, against the specification, clause by clause. You see each one pass, or you see exactly what it does not do yet.

5. 05

   Site acceptance test

   The same test again, on your own hardware and against your live process, with the people who will use it in the room rather than reading about it afterwards.

6. 06

   Handover

   The system on your hardware, the specification it was built to, and both sets of test results, with the people who will run it shown how it works.

Where to start

Tell us what the process does now and what it will not do. The first step is a visit rather than a proposal, and it is made from Hull, East Yorkshire, by the person who would be building the thing. How we work is who that is.