How We Work

At Willard & Lowe Systems, Inc., successful computer and software systems depend on three key factors: (1) our willingness to work closely with you, our client, (2) our many years of design and implementation experience, and (3) our comprehensive technical knowledge.

 Working closely with you

What problems prevent your business from being more productive? You know best what keeps you up at night.

We will work closely with you and your employees to understand the nature of your business. We will listen carefully as you describe the issues that prevent you from working more efficiently, generating greater profits, acquiring new customers, or retaining the loyalty of your existing clients.

Only after we have a strong understanding of your business issues can we begin to define computer and software solutions. We will collaborate with you to design a system that is tailored to improve the productivity of your business. We will continue to collaborate as we build your system to refine its design and to ensure that it will work well for your and your employees.

 Many years of experience

We, the founders of Willard & Lowe, have over 40 years of combined experience successfully designing, developing, and deploying highly reliable computer and software systems that meet or exceed customer requirements. Many of the systems we've implemented have been in mission-critical domains such as healthcare, electronic medical records (EMR), financial services, telecommunications, and NASA space missions.

Our experiences have taught us many lessons that we will apply to the systems solutions we build for you.

Design and implementation are iterative processes to be done in close collaboration with you, our client. We will build rapid prototypes that you and your employees can try. This will refine our solution ideas, correct any wrong assumptions, and inspire new ideas. Close collaboration and rapid prototyping will allow our design and implementation to converge to the right systems solution for you.

We use modern design methodologies. Much of systems design is still an art, but some effective design methodologies have evolved. We are practitioners of model-driven architecture (MDA), an open, industry-standard approach that will accurately describe how our solutions meet your needs and greatly reduce development time.

We won't reinvent the wheel. It is likely that most, if not all, of an appropriate systems solution for your business is an integration of computer components and software applications that you purchase or that you may already have. By not reinventing the wheel each time, we'll save time and reduce your costs. But your solution may require some innovation. We will identify and concentrate our resources upon those elements that represent unique added value. Our experience allows us to optimize the balance between cost and functionality.

We follow industry standards and best practices. We are firmly committed to following industry standards and applying industry best practices. Doing so ensures that our project for you will succeed, and that the solutions we implement will be compatible with your existing computer and software components and any components you add in the future. We believe that successful businesses today are adaptable because of the leverage of industry standards combined with the best practices within their domains.

Reliability and maintainability don't happen by accident. We have many years of experience deploying computer and software systems in mission-critical environments, such as large hospital EMR, financial services including ATM networks and stock trading systems, telecommunications billing systems and large databases, and NASA space missions. We have over two decades of systems development experience with fault-tolerant systems and large-scale online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that operate at near zero downtime with millions of simultaneous users. We actively drive reliability and maintainability features into each and every system we create. We extensively test each system component, and after all the components have been integrated, we perform stress tests on the system as a whole to ensure it will meet your peak demands. We understand that once a system has been deployed, it is often expensive and disruptive to bring it down for maintenance and upgrades. Therefore, we will design your systems to be reconfigurable and maintainable live "out in the field" to meet future needs. If appropriate, we will incorporate remote monitoring features to provide real-time performance and status updates.

Strong project management. No solution will provide any benefits to you if it can't be implemented. Our years of project management experience with large and small projects have taught us the best techniques to ensure projects get done on time and on budget. Our project schedules will include mutually agreed-upon milestones, and we will employ proven techniques such as modularity and incremental development to meet them. We will always keep you "in the loop" during the development of your system.

 Comprehensive technical knowledge

At Willard & Lowe Systems, Inc., we have comprehensive end-to-end expertise in designing, developing, and deploying computer and software systems. We can build and integrate a solution for you that incorporates intuitive graphical user interfaces on the client side, computer components and software packages that manage your business processes and workflow, and secure and protected access to your business data and other data sources.

We can increase your business productivity by building a local network to enable you and your employees to collaborate and share work simultaneously from multiple locations. We can help you attract new customers and retain the loyalty of your existing clients by creating a professionally-designed web site as your business storefront.

We have in-depth knowledge of commercially available computer components and software packages and of the underlying infrastructure technologies.

User interfaces. We can design and build intuitive, easy-to-use user interfaces for your employees and for your customers. Our interfaces can be interactive standalone programs, or they can be based on the popular web browsers. We can build interfaces for the Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Macintosh platforms. We have expertise with Java, C++, .Net, and other software technologies for creating applications.

Web sites. We can create a professionally-designed website that will serve as your business storefront. A good website will attract new customers to your business. It will enable you to communicate better with your existing clients and maintain a closer relationship with them to ensure their continued loyalty. We use professional graphics designers, and if desired, we can even have your site optimized for search engines to maximize the traffic to the site. We can build web pages using client-side technologies such as dynamic HTML and JavaScript and server-side technologies such as Java servlets, JSP, and PHP.

Mobile devices. To further enhance the efficiency of your business, we can enable the use of mobile devices such as laptops and PDAs. You and your employees will have secure access to shared data and be able to work collaboratively from any locations in your offices, your homes, and even away on trips. Having instant, real-time access to data and status information can be a major boost to business productivity.

Automation and integration. We can automate business processes that you and your employees currently perform manually. We'll ensure that any computer components and software packages that we install will work together, and we will integrate with any computers and software that you already have. We understand the intercommunications "glue" that ties everything together into a cohesive whole that makes sense to your business.

Networking. We can create a local network for your business so that all your computers and software can "talk" to each other and work together. We can tie your business into the Internet to make its vast resources available to you and your employees. If you need a highly reliable system, we have strong expertise in designing and building nonstop systems.

Enterprise infrastructure and web services. The enterprise infrastructure is the software that makes your computer network and all its computers and software work together. Based on your needs, we can implement any of several industry standards for infrastructure. The platform-independent Java-based J2EE standard uses commercial application servers such as BEA WebLogic or JBoss. The .Net standard uses Microsoft client- and server-side technologies. We can develop CORBA systems with either Java or C++. We can design and generate industry-standard web services to provide business functionality that are compatible with all infrastructure technologies and with client applications written in different programming languages.

Secure data access and integration. Your data is critical to your business. We can implement storage and backup strategies to ensure you never lose any data. We can provide secure access where each user is authenticated (who are you?) and authorized (are you allowed to access that?). If your data are in different formats (files, databases, live data streams, legacy archives, etc.) or you need to access to other sources such as commercial databases and external web services, we can incorporate enterprise information integration (EII) technologies to access and integrate all the data. You'll be able to use new and old information in ways that enable you to run your business more profitably.

Training and support. We will train you and your employees to effectively use any software that we implement for you or that you already have. We will provide complete user documentation. We have maintenance and support contracts so that we're always available to fix any problems or to perform any upgrades. As noted above, we have a strong commitment to reliability and maintainability that we will apply to any project.