In December of last year, we started working with Round Peg Cambridge Ltd. Established in 1995 by Nick Harrison, Round Peg has built an enviable reputation in the Cambridge Hub for being a nimble and competitive alternative to the larger design and engineering consultancies and has become a go-to for clients including Evonetix, Aveillant and AstraZeneca.

At the heart of the Round Peg process is a desire to be agile, which led them to invest in a bespoke business management software to reduce administration overheads. Having looked at what was available in the marketplace ‘off the shelf’, they found that the products available didn’t fulfil their needs, with features they didn’t need and others, like document management that were missing. Having seen a bespoke system developed for one of their customers that successfully fulfils their needs, they decided to commission the development of a bespoke solution of their own.

Initial’s discussions focused on two main areas:

• Our phased approach to the development process and demonstration of our approach to software design and usability through our experience developing similar solutions.

• Discussing their requirements in detail, to better understand their business management processes, identify their aims and objectives, and establish priorities for phased delivery of the solution.

We started the first phase of development in January of this year, and this was delivered to production in April, followed by a suite of enhancements and we are about to start Phase 2.

Nick and his team are delighted with the application and the success of our working relationship with them is demonstrated in the following testimonial:

“At Round Peg we have always had a specific vision of what our business management software would look like; something simple and elegant. Off the shelf solutions were never going to give us the streamlined solution we were looking for. Finding the right vendor to create our dream was always going to be the key to success and as a small business ourselves we like to work with other small, local businesses and so upon discovering Nick and his team it quickly became clear that we spoke the same language and they could bring our vision to life.

We had a comprehensive specification which CSE worked with and challenged where necessary to achieve the optimum results. We had also asked for the solution to be integrated with Microsoft 365 and Nick and his team worked incredibly hard to do this for us; they understood the brief entirely and gave us exactly what we asked for.

We’re absolutely delighted with Phase 1 of this project and are very much looking forward to moving onto Phases 2 and 3, which will streamline our business significantly and cut down on unnecessary administration. A huge goal we are trying to achieve with the database is to have real time reporting on project spend and given the success of phase 1 we are excited to continue this project with CSE and see the finished product.

At Round Peg we have a history of creating long term vendor partnerships, especially locally and we very much look forward to continuing our partnership with Cambridge Software Engineering on this project and beyond.”

Over the years, we have built bespoke business management solutions for several of our clients, as they have found  ‘Off the Shelf’ solutions are built to a generic design and often don’t suite the way they work or contain too many features that they don’t need. This coupled with the repeat costs of a per seat subscription model make the one-off costs of a bespoke solution a more attractive proposition. Our solutions have also been able to bridge the gap more easily between them and our clients other Project Management solutions.

For more information about CSE and this case study, or our services please contact us on:

01223 968100 or enquiries@cambseng.com