It can be confusing putting together a functional specification. What do you actually need, and what elements can you do without? Many technology consultants will offer to write a functional spec for you, but at a cost of sometimes tens of thousands of pounds. That spec or invitation to tender (ITT) can instead be put together for you by a consultancy with a meticulous understanding of technology scoping.

When creating your ITT or spec, Balloon One’s software consultants will fully explore your warehousing operation and its requirements, deciding which technology aspects you should implement. The resulting functional spec or scoping document will not only have saved you considerable time, but thanks to our significant experience and expertise, it will also be incredibly cost-effective.

Our warehouse software consultants will take your chosen systems — whether ERP, WMS, inventory planning, demand forecasting, ecommerce or delivery, or a combination of a number of these — and customise them to your individual needs, configuring all aspects according to your requirements.

The implementation of your bespoke warehouse IT solutions includes software development, configuration, report writing and data migration. You may choose to take ownership of some of these tasks, such as report writing. But we can provide services to help and assist with this and any other customisation and configuration you need.

During and after implementation, your users will need training so that they can be ready to use their new software immediately. You will also want them to be well-versed in all aspects of the software; there’s no point in implementing sophisticated new functionality if they don’t know how to use it.

Our trainers will design and deliver bespoke courses on our warehouse software solutions for your staff. Or, we can train a number of superusers, who can then use these skills to train other staff, saving time and money.

It is often useful to revisit training once the system has gone live and when users are more familiar with certain elements of the solution but can also benefit from more enhanced capabilities.

Our support and maintenance services are essentially a reactive provision. We run a well-staffed support desk that provides support via phone, email and messaging. We can respond to enquiries about your software and you can log tickets if you have issues that you need us to investigate and solve.

If your software is not cloud-based and fully up to date all the time, we can also plan and implement software upgrades, and apply the latest bug fixes and patches from the software suppliers.

Monitoring is a proactive function that is used to alert us and you to any failures, allowing for seamless operation of your warehouse software solutions and the continuous, faultless running of your distribution operations.

Using PRTG network monitoring software, we observe and check your mission-critical technology, including important host servers and software applications. We also collect data to proactively monitor your CPU, memory, disk pace usage, as well as analysing general performance and alerting to backup failures and other application specific checks.

The Balloon One team can host your on-premise software for you, providing full management of systems on what is, essentially, your own private cloud platform.

Our warehouse software consultants can run the entire application stack for you, alleviating you of the IT burden and the need to provide your own hardware and software maintenance. With an approved service level agreement (SLA) in place, this gives you the peace of mind of a software solution that has built-in system reliability at an agreed, contracted cost.