Comss Limited, Longford

Comss is a software company with a difference – our products are designed by business people to be used by business people. When the global recession began to bite, we realised that most small to medium sized companies didn’t have access to software tools that would enable them to run lean businesses in lean times. We knew survival required lower cost, more efficient operations AND smarter, more informed decisions. But when we reviewed what was available, we saw over-engineered, expensive to operate software with the most important functions clogged-up with non-essential features. So we set out to change that by building a suite of applications that not only deliver functional value but can be run by fewer staff and that require less resources, time and cost to implement. However, we knew efficiency could only be part of the solution. We also recognised that we had to deliver effectiveness too. This meant that we had to provide complete financial visibility and operational insight so that business leaders could take better, more informed decisions.

We analysed each of the application areas that would be needed to run an efficient business. We identified core functions and stripped these back to a streamlined workflow that enables the user to do their job more easily. At every stage we measured what we created against a number of key goals:

Thinking Lean – we removed anything that was not essential to the success of the business
Eliminating repetition – we enabled all the modules to draw on a common record so that data only has to be entered once – saving users – and the business significant time and money
Improving financial and operational visibility – we built in alerts to warn of potential risks and, functions to capture data at key points in a project so that decisions could be taken more quickly and with greater certainty
Improving project profitability – we designed all the modules to integrate and work with the same user interface