Consulting

As with any engineering effort, setting clear goals is the essential first step if you want to reach a successful conclusion.  It seems an obvious thing to say, but it is one thing to know you want to implement an automated home or boardroom, and quite another to write a specification for what equipment you want and how it should inter-operate.

We can guide you through this process using standard methodologies for discovery of requirements, turning imprecise ideas like “I want one something that sounds cool” or “blue flashing lights are good” into a set of concrete goals.  This provides a benchmark for system design and for measuring quality and success.

This will result in documented requirements from which a system design can be built.

System Design

If instructed to do so, we can then take these requirements to the next stage and produce a detailed system design including equipment specification which can be used as the meat of a tender for supply and installation.

System Optimisation

For designs prepared by others you may be comfortable with the overall direction, but wish to validate the solution either from a technical or financial point of view.  From well-defined requirements, we can perform an independent review of the design and suggest changes to meet your goals, whether your bias is towards quality, usability, cost saving, future proofing or a mix of each.

We will produce a list of recommendations, giving the impact on cost and benefits, to enable you to choose the optimal solution to meet your goals.

Programming Specification

Any automation system will required a degree of system configuration and, as with any bespoke package, high-end products require greater levels of sophistication in terms of configuration and programming.  In order to realise the full potential of what is usually a significant investment, documenting the system (e.g. user-interaction) and a structured approach to programming is essential.  This has the following benefits:

• Time spent up-front considering and documenting system design decreases actual development time.  Therefore it is important to view system design as part of the overall development process.  The net benefit being reduced overall development cost, a higher quality final product, or both.

• A well documented system enables the client to understand what the final product should be – so expectations are well-established up-front – and provides the client with the opportunity to input into the system design prior to development commencing.  It is well understood that changes become more expensive as work progresses.

• A structured, standards based, development cycle helps to ensure well-written programs.  This greatly increases the likelihood that the system will meet the established expectations and also makes future changes or additions simpler, and consequently less expensive.

A clear functional specification – meaning “what will the system do, and how will it do it” – is effectively the “plans” of a system, and can be thought of in similar terms to an architect or engineer preparing plans before construction work begins.  You’d have a very strange (and possibly unsafe) house if you made it up as you went along without plans, and programming is just the same.

To this end, we will prepare documentation covering high-level design and functional specification, including special modules.