AMS: A new home for access and excel

Overview

Surely custom Access and Excel applications are also used in your company to support daily business with company-specific software. These are developed to cover special business needs which aren't supported by standard applications. Originally intended only as "mini-solutions", many have developed over the course of time into ever more complex applications.

Access and Excel know-how is common, so these solutions are often developed by business departments themselves. Your central IT, if you have one, therefore has nothing to do with them, and cannot or will not get involved. Then there's the fact that in most cases there is no documentation for these applications.

Experience shows that these applications eventually get "orphaned", since the former developers or owners have long since taken on different duties. But nobody wants to do without these applications or replace them. Thus it's difficult when changes are needed. These are often done unprofessionally, since there is no professional assistance available. Of course, that just makes the continued maintenance of these applications even more difficult.

Consist Software Solutions can gladly take over these applications under remote maintenance. Our staff have a wide variety of industry know-how and confident knowledge of Access, Excel, VBA, and SQL. For this mini-AMS, we offer the same services and quality processes, including a service level agreement (SLA) and reporting, that we offer for all other AMS topics.

Here's a short recap of what me mean by AMS. Application Maintenance Services – AMS – means for you the transfer of responsibility for error correction and further development of your custom applications to us. The development and knowledge of your business processes still remain yours, but you leave the maintenance and further development to us. You free up resources for primary processes, which you can then develop with your own staff. The service is based on standardized service modules with defined functions, processes, quality, and payment systems. The individual overall service is completed by optional add-on services. This applies for both complex applications and for small applications like Access or Excel files.

Familiarization with your Access or Excel applications is based on a half- to full-day workshop with you on site and we can then enhance our knowledge ourselves. In case of a lack of documentation or even entirely absent know-how, we can perform our own initial analysis and create basic documentation for the application (including a data model, etc.) Depending on the complexity of the application, it is possible for our staff to familiarize themselves within a few days to a week with your Access or Excel application.

For later maintenance, then, individual contracts are concluded depending on the maintenance effort required. An agreement with, for instance, 12 hours of support per month is thoroughly realistic and possible for a medium-sized application.