We write the software a yard is currently doing by hand

Danis Flow is a systems and data consultancy working with haulage fleets, field-service trades and industrial contractors in North America. One principal, Goran Danis, and no account manager layer between a client and the person who writes the code. The commercial site is danisflow.com — this page exists so that anyone checking up on the mail infrastructure documented here can see who is behind it.

The problem, before it is a software problem

A dispatch board built by hand before six and already wrong by ten. A dig ticket that arrives as a photograph and gets re-keyed at nine at night by whoever was on the roof that morning. A thickness-test report whose next-due date is buried inside the report. Hours, parts and travel written into a duplicate book in a cab, then typed a second time days later by somebody who was not on the job.

None of those is a software problem yet. They are all the same problem: the working day is made of facts that nobody has written down in one place. Writing them down is the first thing an engagement does — and occasionally it is the last, because the honest answer is sometimes that a changed habit fixes it.

Eight mechanisms

Every engagement is one of these eight, pointed at a particular trade. They are described as mechanisms rather than as products, because the same machinery reads a bill of lading and a weld radiograph.

Who this is for

Six shapes of work, and fifty-eight trades inside them. The shape matters more than the trade: the machinery is the same whether the document being read is a lease or a thickness-test report.

A representative sample of the trades inside those shapes:

• Tanker and bulk haulage
• Hazmat carriers
• Vacuum truck fleets
• Intermodal chassis operators
• Hydrovac and vacuum excavation
• Concrete sawing and core drilling
• Directional drilling
• Non-destructive testing
• Ultrasonic thickness and corrosion mapping
• Radiography weld inspection
• Sewer CCTV surveying
• Substation relay testing
• Backflow prevention testing
• Scale and weighbridge calibration
• Scaffold erection
• Boiler retubing
• Cooling tower cleaning
• Industrial refrigeration and ammonia compressors
• Electric motor rewinding
• Conveyor belt vulcanizing

The complete list of fifty-eight is on danisflow.com/industries.

How an engagement runs

Four stages, and a client can stop after any of them. Each one ends with something they keep, so stopping early never leaves a half-built system and a bill.

1. Week one

   A written description of the day

   Time spent with the people who actually do the work — the dispatcher, the foreman, the person keying tickets at nine at night — and a short document naming every repeated act, what it costs in hours, and which one is worth doing first. It is theirs whatever happens next.

2. Two to four weeks

   One mechanism, one crew

   The narrowest useful version of one thing, built against real records rather than a pilot on invented data. One trade, one depot, one crew, in use by the people who complained about the problem in the first place.

3. Four to eight weeks

   In front of the whole yard

   The rest of the depots, the rest of the fleet, and the awkward cases the first crew never hit. Most of the disagreements happen here, which is the reason for doing it in this order rather than the reverse.

4. Ongoing, and small

   It becomes ordinary

   The measure of a finished build is that nobody mentions it any more. Handover is in writing: the code, the records, where it runs, what it costs to run, how to change it and who to call. No part of it is hostage to one consultant still being available.

What we will not do

The refusals are the part worth reading, because each one is how this kind of work usually goes wrong.

• Rip and replace. The dispatch board, the accounts package and the maintenance records stay where they are. We read them. Replacing a system that works is somebody else's invoice, not a benefit to the client.
• Per-vehicle pricing. Nothing is priced per truck, per seat or per user. A yard of nine gets the same machinery as a yard of nine hundred, because building it is the same work either way.
• A number nobody measured. No projected savings, no modelled payback, no figure that begins with "up to". Every result published on danisflow.com was measured after delivery and sits beside the engagement it came from.
• Data leaving quietly. Where records live, what leaves the building and who can read it are written down before the first stage starts. If part of a build needs an outside service, it is named in that document or it does not happen.
• A build nobody asked for. If the honest answer after stage one is that a whiteboard and one changed habit would fix it, that is what the document says.

Getting in touch

There is no phone queue, no street office and no chat widget. A useful first message is one paragraph about the hour of the week that everybody in the yard complains about.