Computer Solutions’ History

For three decades Computer Solutions has been delivering technical solutions, products and services to Texas companies. Our clients range in size from small businesses of fewer than twenty to companies occupying spots on the Fortune 500. A dedication to developing lasting relationships with our customers and a commitment to customer service have made Computer Solutions one of the fastest growing companies in San Antonio. Our growth is largely fueled by referral business which is a testament to the caliber and dedication of every person that makes up the Computer Solutions’ team.

A Winning Strategy

The commercialization of the Internet has forever changed the world as we know it and created countless opportunities and significant business challenges for every company. In the last five years Computer Solutions has identified two such opportunities that have expanded the way we do business and our interactions with our customers.

2003 - Much like the financial, medical and legal professions, technology has become so complex, that many highly specialized skill sets are required to create and maintain information systems that are secure, scalable, and reliable. Most small, medium, and large companies can no longer afford to staff the variety of specializations required to meet the needs of the modern organization. Information systems have become mission critical and system outages and security threats can cripple a company overnight.

Recognizing this opportunity, we created our managed services offering. This service offering provides infrastructure design and implementation of secure, scalable and reliable technology infrastructures, built to industry best practices, and then provides ongoing support twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The Netwatch team is dedicated to proactive system maintenance and monitoring to prevent hardware failures, virus infections, and security threats - internal and external. Our first response help desk efficiently helps customers resolve simple workstation problems and escalates more serious system issues to one of the many highly skilled, certified engineers spanning the spectrum of technical specializations.

2005 – With the business landscape changing so rapidly, companies need to be nimble - quickly transforming themselves to meet new challenges and opportunities. Typical challenges:

• New government regulations and corporate compliance requirements are consuming vast people resources and eroding profits
• E-Commerce is threatening traditional brick and mortar businesses
• Business continuity initiatives require complex and expensive disaster recovery strategies
• Redundant, error prone, manual processes cannot compete against low cost overseas labor markets
• The lack of real time business intelligence and enterprise visibility inhibits nimbleness and decision making

We responded with two new executive level service offerings, P-MAP (Performance Management Assessment Program) and V-CIO (Virtual Chief Information Officer). Together these services deliver peak performance and provide comprehensive, enterprise grade, strategic and tactical leadership – a delivery vehicle to align technology with business strategy and gain competitive advantage.

P-MAP - baselines a company’s current state (strategic objectives, business challenges, opportunities, processes and systems). The assessment evaluates the company from a holistic point of view to develop a highly optimized strategic roadmap specifically designed to deliver high value and quantifiable ROI. The roadmap provides activities, timelines, budgetary estimates and ROI calculations. The value of the holistic perspective cannot be overstated. Companies historically identify a business problem and look for a quick, low cost, tactical solution. Considering the business problem in isolation, without an enterprise wide context, creates an entirely new set of business problems. See side bar “When More Is Less”.

V-CIO - delivers world class strategic leadership that executes the roadmap while navigating the detours encountered in a constantly changing business environment. This elite, executive level service, is designed to help companies leverage technology to achieve operational excellence and create competitive advantage. Our team of seasoned professionals come from all walks of life with diverse industry experiences and educational backgrounds. Dedicated to our client’s success, they are characterized as innovative thought and change leaders. Together they provide a caliber of service within reach of only the largest and wealthiest companies in the nation.

No CIO is effective without a great support system. Computer Solutions is uniquely positioned to provide that support system with our thirty year history building one of the finest teams of business and technical consultants in the region. We pride ourselves in recruiting and nurturing only the very best talent. Our executive leadership professionals have at their disposal over fifty technical resources with deep skill sets - all under one roof. This is truly “End to End” coverage. This vertical integration provides great efficiency that translates to customer value.

Side bar

When More Is Less!

As technology evolved over the last twenty years, Common Off the Shelf Software or COTS provided companies with a low cost solution to solve immediate business problems. Over time we find that companies acquire tens or even hundreds of these software applications. Consider a typical real world scenario. An HR department has the following software applications; employment application tracking, payroll system, security and parking badge management, performance evaluations software, training solutions, and standard operating procedures management. This may seem to be an extreme case, but is a real life example. It’s easy to understand how this occurred though. As a company grows and experiences pain in a specific functional area, it is natural to look for a solution to alleviate the pain. While the company may consider a complete HR management system, a cost benefit analysis indicates that the benefits of such a system do not justify the financial cost or the training and change management cost in the organization let alone the possibility that the hardware infrastructure may not support such a sophisticated solution. So they exercise the option to buy a lesser expensive more focused functional application. Over time many applications are added in the same manner. Now, when a new employee is hired the employee’s information must be manually entered into multiple systems. This is highly inefficient for a whole variety of reasons. Because these individual software applications lack the ability to integrate with each other, they become islands of data, creating a lack of enterprise visibility. Each application may have its own maintenance agreement and recurring maintenance cost. That also means that each manufacturer may provide their own updates and patches that must be administered causing an IT burden. While less than ideal there is also considerable opposing force to change. You will hear all kinds of arguments opposing change; “we already have an investment that we’ll be throwing away”, “business interruption time will be high”, “retraining will be expensive”, “new infrastructure will require significant new capitalization”, etc. All of these arguments are valid. However, effective change management can reduce the stress to the organization and, in fact, improvements in employee perception of their value to the organization, job satisfaction, and work life in general is one of the greatest by products we see in effective efficient change. While this is relatively narrow example, when you magnify this principle across a large organization the costs in quality, efficiency, effectiveness, flexibility, decision support, etc. are immeasurable. Most importantly they restrict a company’s ability to transform themselves, adapt and change in an ever changing business landscape.

When Less is More

Based on our experiences with customers we are finding that the principle of “When More Is Less” is a constant of varying degrees. While some have gone to the extreme of “When More is Less” many have taken a route that is more enterprising but equally costly to the organization – many (usually hundreds or even thousands) of small home grown partially electronic processes created using spreadsheets, MS Access databases, or similar. The result is still the same as the “When More is Less” principle; lack of enterprise visibility, manually redundant error prone processes with multiple versions of the truth, loss of process or information with employee turnover, etc. We find that the greatest efficiency comes when an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application plays the anchor role in the organization. Key pieces of functionality delivered by ERP are; accounting, HR, payroll, fixed assets, materials management, supply chain management, time & billing, and a host of other core business functionalities. ROI is greatly increased when the ERP solution uses common database and application interfaces for integration with other applications. In a supporting cast role we may also have one or more LOB – Line of Business Application that delivers functionality specific to an industry that is not included in an ERP solution. Sometimes it may be better to modify or customize the ERP solution to include the missing industry specific functionality. In addition, we find that having a single solution that provides a homogeneous access point to all employees or information workers (intranet), document management, workflow capabilities, BI (business intelligence) reporting/KPIs/Scorecards, and collaborative workspaces together provides a complete complement of core applications. In this model, all applications work together in concert to deliver a single version of the truth as efficiently as possible. Employees create custom workflows using the workflow and collaboration tools that provide unlimited opportunities for efficient business processes. In our HR example, “When More is Less”, the core HR payroll system is the ERP solution and all other processes for parking passes, security badges, performance evaluations, SOPs, training, online employment applications, etc are all delivered on the company intranet and integrated with ERP to increase efficiency and eliminate islands of data.