Business Systems
One system that holds the operation, instead of five that disagree.
When the work is spread across a point-of-sale, a scheduling tool, an accounting package and a spreadsheet that settles the arguments, the cost is not licence fees. It is the hour a day somebody spends keying the same job in three times, and the decisions made on numbers nobody trusts.
Problems we see in this category.
If two or three of these describe your operation, this is the right page.
- The same customer, job or order is entered into more than one system by hand.
- Two systems report different numbers for the same month and nobody can say which is right.
- A report that leadership actually uses is assembled manually, and it is late because of it.
- Something important — commissions, deadlines, stock across locations — lives only in one person's head or one person's spreadsheet.
- The software you bought fits somebody else's business and your team works around it rather than in it.
Deliverables.
- A written map of the operation as it actually runs, including the informal steps people do not put in a process document.
- A decision, in writing, on what to replace, what to connect and what to leave alone.
- A specification the engineering team builds from, with the workflows, the roles and the reports named.
- The built system, delivered in stages you can use before the whole thing is finished.
- Acceptance criteria agreed in advance, so 'done' is a test rather than an opinion.
Process.
Diagnose, then prioritise, then build. We sit with the people doing the work before we specify anything, because the process document and the actual process are rarely the same. Engineering is delivered in-house by SOPHIA XT, our engineering arm, with the consulting side managing the engagement and holding the scope.
Work in this category.
Each of these has a destination you can open and a write-up that states what was delivered, what it connects to, and what has not been verified.
Ethereal EBS
A multi-tenant enterprise business suite with a real double-entry ledger underneath it and a cross-company wholesale market wired in.
Read it ›Tophat
An enterprise business suite for a commercial real estate brokerage, with an assistant that answers from the brokerage's own rows and cites the record it read.
Read it ›ServiceLens / DiagBuddyGO
A field-service platform where dispatch, diagnosis, parts and inventory are one workflow, and the diagnostic answers are grounded in the technician's own history.
Read it ›Smoker's Alley
Retail operations for a three-store smoke shop on one system, with each store's stock kept its own.
Read it ›3 Point Forward's own systems
The public site, the staff CRM and the client portal behind it — the consulting side specifying, the engineering side building.
Read it ›The business systems assessment takes about three minutes and tells you which of the above you are actually looking at.
Business systems assessment Book a consultation +1 (586) 310-3679
SOPHIA XT is the engineering arm of 3 Point Forward.
3 Point Forward
3 Point Forward does the business work: diagnosing what is actually wrong with an operation, planning the implementation, applied-AI consulting, training the staff who will run it, and managing the engagement.
SOPHIA XT — the engineering arm
SOPHIA XT does the engineering: custom business software, integrations, AI engineering, developer tooling and the research underneath it.
One company, two jobs. 3 Point Forward defines the operational problem and the implementation plan; SOPHIA XT builds what the plan needs. A company that already knows what it wants built can go straight to SOPHIA XT, and a company that needs the problem defined first should start at 3 Point Forward. Either door reaches the same team.