Our story starts with Alex Bundock and his three daughters Moira, Joanne and Jacqueline

August 2017 - Anton (married to Jackie) and Kevin (married to Jo), two Brothers-in-law, were sitting in the garden in the sunshine having a beer and cooking on an open fire. They were considering what to do in their sunset years utilising their decades of IT experience - especially in software development. Both had worked their way through the ranks and both ended up in management.

They hit on the idea of providing business tools that would solve challenges with bespoke applications but would make the whole software development quick and easy. James (married to Mo), the third Brother-in-law was starting up their distillery. Kevin could see that the greatest risk was in Revenue reporting and compliance. He suggested the idea of automating the monthly Revenue alcohol reporting to James and Moira and the idea of using this as a beta site was hatched. The initial version of ICALA was installed December 2017 and the first Revenue Reports we produced and submitted January 2018.

Our business tools are called ICALA and INDAWO and they have evolved over the past two years into robust and functionally rich products. Everything is configurable, so there is no hard coding in the software. The tools are designed to never impose any limitations on the user in any way. The data is defined and captured once. This ensures integrity and consistency and is continually reused.

ICALA

We achieved our first goal of saving the distillery staff 5 days. It took that long to consolidate and prepare the monthly Irish Revenue Alcohol Reports. ICALA tracked the activities for alcohol intake, distillation, bottling, dispatches and stock-takes. Once the stocktake details were entered the Revenue reports could be produced. Over the past two years ICALA evolved with the Distillery and now deals with multiple products, tracking stock (by batch) and marketing events, processing of shop and tours of the Distillery. ICALA also caters for multiple bottling and packaging activities for miniatures, presentation/gift packs and bottles in tubes. We are looking into Financial reporting and Irish Food Board reporting. Lastly through APIs we provide traceability data to be displayed on their website.

We thought if we believed in our products, and we definitely do, then we should use them ourselves. So we track bugs fixing, enhancements, new functionality development and support activities in ICALA. This aids with invoicing at month-end.

Our second Client was involved with Health and Safety, Quality and Facility Management. This is know as SHEQ. The document manager caters for quality standards (ISO) requirements and ICALA caters for both Incident and Facility Management activities.

Our third client has started a gym and we track their shifts, classes, members and prospects. We integrate with their chosen banking application. We also do their Stock Management and shop sales.

We have spoken to Private Schools about tracking students through their school career, their homework and their test results. We have also looked at providing a Portal for communication with Parents, Guardians and Students. So no more excuses of “I never received the letter!”

INDAWO

We started off just placing locations that stock the Distillery products on Google maps. We can now do same on Open Street maps and will soon be able to use Bing Maps. We evolved the product to include website and social media links and to categorise the outlets either via a simple category name or by placing them on a two dimensional matrix. This data provides input to sales strategy definition and sales planning sessions. We have made the product available via their Stockist page on their website.