Our team have been working with databases of all types for more than 20 years. Often these systems are actually complex bespoke applications of which the 'database' is actually only a means of data storage at the heart of the system. Our goal is to capture your business process and from it develop a user-friendly application to massively improve your efficiency.
The value in these systems is that they reflect your business processes, guiding users the best way through, enforcing requirements where necessary, capturing all the key information and relationships and providing powerful tools to give management an overview.
We work with users at all levels of the organisation - this helps ensure that the people who will ultimately use the system have buy-in which can be the key to successful adoption. This also helps us to understand how things actually work which may differ from the way they are supposed to - e.g. if the users know they often have incomplete information we can build that knowledge in rather than add work-arounds later.
We will challenge your processes to help you choose the best path forward rather than always doing things a certain way "because that's the way it's always been done" but at the same time we are always aware that our job is to build a system to suit your process rather than forcing you to change to fit into ours.
We often build databases to replace legacy systems which 'do the job' but have not been designed with the user in mind. It is often necessary to retain the existing legacy data, so we have developed a number of techniques to handle this, along with the skills to understand legacy systems which often come with limited or no documentation.
Sample Work
Scottish SPCA Membership Database - system to manage all contact information, track donations and generate income reports
Scottish SPCA Animal Database - used to track all animals in the care of the charity, including vet history and rehoming information
Scottish SPCA Education Database - used to manage and record the charity's educational visit programme
The Art Newspaper - manages advertising sales
St Andrews University - manages stock and deliveries of marketing materials
Technology
We work with a number of different technologies so that we can choose the most appropriate for your business needs. We build database back-ends for our projects from the ground up in Oracle, MSSQL or MySQL, and front-ends using web technologies like Coldfusion or PHP or desktop applications like Filemaker Pro.
Our Database Development Credentials
Horisk are one of just 20 international, UK and Scottish companies to be awarded a place on the Scottish Government Application Design & Development (ADDS) Framework - one of the key elements of this framework is public sector database development in Scotland.
We have database clients throughout Scotland and the wider UK. We are ideally situated to provide database development throughout Scotland. In addition to our offices in Fife and Edinburgh we are in easy reach of Dundee, Perth, Stirling and Glasgow.
Horisk have been shortlisted for the Fife Business Awards and three times for The Courier Business Awards for businesses in Dundee, Angus, Fife & Perthshire, being Highly Commended in 2018.