Welcome to Carvel Solutions

Ascending new heights in modern IT architecture and design.

Summer 2021 - Moving Online

2021 to date has been an incredibly hectic year for us as retailers move to online-first businesses and blending online and in-store operating models together with trying to grapple with the challenges of online/digital operations.

Our early prototypes using Spring Cloud and complex event processing have been progressing steadily alongside our main consulting services.

The next stage of our development now continues investigating FaaS with Golang to create sophisticated complex event buses, and identifying opportunities and challenges with choreography patterns, and looking to blend the right capabilities of service platforms and advanced data models alongside cloud-native designs and use of IaaS, and PaaS approaches.

In the coming weeks, we will be posting some material on this site that describes some of the challenges for retailers moving from store-based approaches to online-based, which impacts areas of finance, inventory, and order management. We shall also be providing a couple of technical papers discussing the virtues and challenges of using cloud-native designs and the additional supporting services that are required for a production-grade solution.

World Class IT Architecture Services

Providing Enterprise, Business, and Solution Architecture services to deliver innovative value to your business.

Our unique insight and experience enables us to see how best to clarify your IT vision, and how best to deliver it with the most appropriate strategy and roadmap, be it to reduce operational costs through better automation or decision-making or to offer a uniquely potent online service where the customer is at the centre of that journey.

With a clear vision and direction, we can help plan and deliver that vision as a series of business and system changes to reduce development time, and costly repairs.

Enterprise Architecture

Taking the right direction can save enormously by investing wisely in new IT. Our years of experience allows us to validate your vision and objectives and help you find an appropriate path and roadmap for change and improvement, as well as best exploiting and replacing your legacy systems with minimal risk to operations. Our approach, methods, and frameworks ensure a structured and comprehensive analysis of your existing landscape, allowing us to blend short and longer term changes into your environment.

Find out more...

Business Architecture

Understanding how an organisation is structured and works is key to understanding how best to change to adopt new business agility, and make best use of systems and system automation. By aiding business change, and designing new roles and operating models, together with correctly aligning applications, we can maximise your ability to fully exploit your IT investments, automate where appropriate, and refocus your colleagues to focus on delivering the most value to your business.

Find out more...

Solution Architecture

Our structured approach to defining and helping deliver the most innovative and sophisticated solutions can ensure your IT investments deliver optimally. Our experience allows us to ask the questions to avoid many of the common problem areas, and omissions. Our holistic approach means you have a good path to developing both tactically and strategically at the same time. And good quality specifications that we produce ensure good delivery from your development partners, be they on-shore or off-shore.

Find out more...

Our Clients

We have delivered innovation to the best UK and International companies in the retail, airline, finance, and automotive sectors, as well as national and local government organisations.

For our clients, we have provided enterprise and solution architecture services for e-commerce, flight booking, subscription management, supply-chain and order management, and payroll system delivery programmes and projects to name but a few.

It is our varied and extensive experience that allows us to cross-fertilse the best ideas and concepts, and share the value those innovations can bring.

Domain Knowledge

Our specialisms are more focused in commerce and retail, with particular skills in Digital, E-Commerce, Online Security, Customer Behaviour Prediction, and Supply Chain Order Forecasting and Management.

We bring innovative thoughts from social marketing to supplier delivery management, which contain advanced concepts learned from successful projects that have been matured internally through deep analysis and extensive experimentation. The result is a set of models and patterns that we can leverage to quickly develop advanced concepts and put flesh on the bones of any good vision.

This list isn't exhaustive, but covers the most interesting and exciting areas of digital and e-commerce domains.

E-Commerce and Digital Marketing

Our expertise and experience in e-commerce, from specifying innovative user journeys, leading-edge social marketing and advocacy, personalisation, dynamic flows (think bots for site navigation), and screen layout and design, together with the foundations of catalogue and product management, pricing and discounting, basket management across channels and devices, check-out and payment processing, and integration with order management, warehouse management, and delivery management systems, we can provide you with the knowledge to propel your e-commerce and digital offerings into the next (post-Covid) era.

Find out more...

Consumer Profiling and Behaviour Prediction

Utilising our pioneering and proven techniques in human behavioural analysis and prediction, we can help propel your customer profiling, and behaviour prediction capabilities to the next level. By understanding and ensuring your data is best architected and utilised, and necessary processes and methods are implemented to monitor and manage the model configurations, we can assist in implementing a comprehensive solution that delivers accurate data to drive marketing and personalised digital customer journeys.

Find out more...

Regression Analysis and Sales Forecasting

A key part of successful retail replensihment and order management is accurate forecasting. Utilising our unique knowledge in predictive systems, we can aid with establishing a forecasting method and supporting system that allows sophisticated and accurate sales and waste forecasting, and maintenance of any models. This requires understanding of various influences as well as correctly profiling and setting the attributes of products, stores, and events that influence sales. We understand that a good forecasting service is essential to optimised stock and reduced costs of supply and distribution.

Find out more...

Network-based Inventory Planning

Fundamental to supply-chain and order management is the need for powerful inventory planning and management, which means understanding the supply chain network and planning for the movement of inventory across that network. From our years of experience together with our world-class analysis and design skills, we have created a powerful conceptual model that we can use to help drive solution design in order to direct the strategy and implementation of a truly game-changing order management solution. For our larger retail clients, this can help to measure and control inventory movement across their entire network, and optimise stock levels at all points within that network.

Find out more...

IoT, Service and Subscription Management

Our work with leaders in telemetry and IoT along with understanding how to manage services and subscriptions have allowed us to define and design leading-edge solutions for advanced insurance and vehicle control services, which we then adapted for pallet and goods tracking and delivery. Using such technologies can allow remote monitoring and control of those devices based on subscriptions and service packaging. We have patterns for advanced subscription management to enhance product and service offerings to online customers, and derive additional revenue from IoT devices, and location control. This includes adding micro-payments and automated or assisted order management for supplementary services or service changes.

Find out more...

Complex Order Management

From years of defining and designing order management systems for a wide range of needs in various sectors, we have combined that knowledge into a series of patterns for product and service management, and complex order processing. This includes comprehensive protocols with suppliers for quoting, comparing, and placing orders, and tracking their fulfilment and delivery either as standard package deliveries, or as service deliveries and configurations of remote devices. Our expertise in distributed systems and workflow orchestration and event choreography means our solutions are sophisticated and fully able to cater for the most demanding of scenarios.

Find out more...

Technical Skills

Underpinning our Knowledge and Expertise is a range of technical skills that allow us to offer a range of supplementary services.

These skills allow us to bring some reality to our designs to ensure they are practical and can be implemented via development partners and implementation teams.

Indeed, we can help with leading such teams, including those offshore, to help ensure requirements are tightly defined, well understood, and accurately implemented. We truly understand that offshore development can be expensive when adding in rework and late change requests and consequental cost of late delivery. This is often caused by language issues and poor comprehension of intent through incomplete specifications. Our experience with such teams, and a greater insight into their culture helps avoid mistakes and ensures optimal results.

By using our detailed technical design and prototyping services, where we use modern tools to prototype solutions and fully specify and plan their implementation, we can ensure misunderstandings and mistakes are minimised.

Advanced Cloud Computing Design

As part of our extensive analysis and design experience, and world-class expertise in distributed systems, we have found cloud computing to be liberating and a catalyst for allowing us to define and design sophisticated applications and micro-services. Our considerable expertise in modern (lite) workflow orchestration, rule engines, choreography and complex events means we can design sophisticated applications for almost any scenario, and specify those solutions from high level to detailed level with upmost confidence and trouble-free implementation. We can also wireframe user interfaces to clarify requirements and capture details from business stakeholders, avoiding expensive changes at development and testing stages.

Find out more...

Systems and Software Engineering and Prototyping

Our recent engagements have meant we have been able to refresh our technology and software engineering skills, which means we can now provide small-scale development services for proofs-of-concept, prototypes, and pilot implementations. Our knowledge in cloud computing, Java, JavaScript and Python languages, modern UI/UX frameworks such as Vue.js, modern online security and social logins, and advanced software engineering and design allows us to put together powerful demonstrators, prototypes, and technology evaluation rigs to ensure any technical strategy and design is fully considered and explored before handing to your development partners and implementation teams.

Find out more...

Programme Blueprints and Planning

We are often asked to create solution architectures and corresponding programme blueprints and project plans as we truly understand what components need to be delivered and in which sequence regardless of delivery methodology (i.e. agile or waterfall). Our understanding of design and implementation gives us the ability to estimate effort as accurately as possible. We then work with project managers to understand the resourcing available to then determine allocations and accurate timescales. Utilising modern design and planning tools alongside Kanban boards helps us to collate and maintain that information so programme and project managers have complete visibility for the most complex of solutions.

Find out more...

About Us

We are a small boutique IT consultancy offering personalised no-nonsense services to medium and large-sized companies.

Here in the Lakes, we have the space to think clearly about your requirements and needs, and can concentrate on providing the advice and guidance you need to best invest in IT, which is a large and complex arena. Done right, however, and IT can be a game-changer for organisations.

David Leeson, Managing Director

Our consultancy comprises David who provides the main professional services.

Degree educated and a background in IT and software engineering, together with over 30 years of professional experience and success means David can quickly understand the needs of your business, and can confidently advise on the various options for implementing individual solutions, or even help clarify your vision, and advise best on direction and approach for achieving that vision.

David is also an accomplished software and systems engineer, and still regularly builds large applications in Java/Spring, Python, and more recently in Golang.

See David‘s Linked In profile.

Anne Askew

Office Manager

Anne runs the back-office and looks after administration and client relationships. Her years of experience in the hospitality industry gives her the ability to advise on the importance of providing an effective and courteous no-nonsense service. And since working-from-home, she is also our cordon-bleu chef.

George Askew

Social Network Support

George provides various support functions including media capture and social network management. Locally, he helps the community and small businesses to fully exploit social media and social networks and help extend their reach. He is also shaping our background project: minitrader to include social networking elements.

John Askew

Mini Specialist

As former founder of Minimaster, John provides specialist technical knowledge of the motor trade, and particularly classic minis, and is central to our background project: minitrader. He is also actively involved in local projects, and an active member of the mini community and related social networks.

Contact Us

Please drop us a line and contact us if you have any questions or would like to understand better how we can help you.

Telephone: 016973 61173 and speak to Anne, George, or David.

Email: contact@carvelsolutions.com