Discovery

Interested in Working with Us ?

How We Help

Interested in Working with Us ?

Personalized Consultation

At ETHANY, the discovery phase is more than just a meeting—it’s a deep dive into your business, workflows, and challenges to uncover opportunities for efficiency, automation, and innovation.

Our structured yet flexible consultation process ensures that we fully understand your pain points, goals, and existing technology before recommending solutions. We take a collaborative approach, guiding you through the identification of bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and untapped potential, helping you visualize what’s possible with the right technology.

Understanding Your Business Needs

We recognize that every business operates differently, and requirements gathering is a critical part of the Discovery phase. Understanding your business needs involves analyzing current workflows, existing systems, and available data sources to build a solution that is functional, scalable, and aligned with your operations.

To do this effectively, we use a structured approach tailored to how your organization currently processes and manages information.

How We Gather Requirements

Reverse Engineering Paper-Based Workflows

For organizations still relying on manual, paper-based processes, our team works directly with stakeholders to understand how information flows through your business. We analyze:

1) Forms, reports, and written documentation to define how data is captured and processed.

2) Manual approvals, signatures, or tracking systems that need to be automated.

3) Key inputs, outputs, and business logic that guide decision-making.

Using this information, we reverse-engineer the workflow into digital specifications, ensuring that no critical steps or compliance measures are lost when transitioning to an automated system.

Evaluating Legacy Systems

Many businesses operate on aging software or outdated applications, making modernization a challenge. If a legacy system exists, ETHANY performs a deep technical analysis that includes:

1) Digging into the codebase to understand existing functionality and business rules.

2) Walking through each screen with the client, mapping out what each function does, how data moves through the system, and identifying limitations.

3) Examining integrations and dependencies, ensuring that any new system or modernization efforts maintain compatibility with critical business processes.

This hands-on approach ensures that nothing gets lost in translation, preserving business logic while modernizing the system for scalability and efficiency.

Assessing Third-Party Software for Cost & Efficiency

Some businesses rely on third-party software packages that either fail to meet their specific needs or come with excessive costs and unnecessary features. ETHANY helps businesses:

1) Review third-party applications to identify core requirements and eliminate unnecessary complexity.

2) Extract essential functionality to rebuild a custom, lightweight, and cost-effective alternative.

3) Eliminate software bloat while enhancing system performance, usability, and integration with existing workflows.

Leveraging Data from Excel Tracking

Many businesses manage key processes using Excel spreadsheets, which provide a wealth of baseline requirements. ETHANY uses these spreadsheets to:

1) Identify what data is being tracked, how it’s organized, and where inefficiencies exist.

2) Define reporting and analytics requirements based on how the business currently uses Excel for insights.

3) Convert spreadsheet-based workflows into structured database-driven applications, creating a more scalable, automated system.

Analyzing Existing Reports, Dashboards, and Outputs

A company’s current reporting system—manual or automated—provides critical insights into how data is collected and used. Whether reports are generated from existing software, legacy applications, or manual processes, ETHANY:

1) Reviews how reports are generated and formatted to determine what data is most important.

2) Examines underlying code or queries (if an automated system exists) to extract business logic.

3) Identifies gaps and inefficiencies in reporting that may need enhancement in a new system.

By dissecting existing reports, outputs, and dashboards, we gain a clear understanding of how business decisions are made, ensuring that any new system delivers the same or improved insights.

Building the Right Solution from Day One

ETHANY’s structured Discovery Process ensures we gather detailed requirements through hands-on collaboration. Whether reverse-engineering paper workflows, analyzing legacy applications, reviewing Excel-based tracking, optimizing reporting structures, or replacing costly third-party software, we build solutions tailored to your business needs.

Struggling with outdated systems or expensive third-party software? Let’s build the right solution together. Contact us today!

Get started free

We start every client interaction with a free strategy session to help determine the right solution for your business right now and how to best make your business future-proof.

Please send us a bit of information about yourself. To prepare you for our conversation, these are some of the questions we ask:

Who you are?
What's your business
How can we help you?
When would you be ready to start?
Are you happy with your business software solutions today?
Where would you like to see your business software solutions go in the future?