Case study · Enterprise application services · MS Access
The business still ran on a 1997 MS Access application.The skill to maintain it had become scarce in the market.
A Los Angeles diamond merchant’s daily operations ran on an MS Access application its own employees had built and maintained for years. When they left, the skill to replace them had become scarce and expensive to hire. Softenger studied the application end to end, reconstructed how it worked, and wrote down what only its builders had known.
The application as Softenger found it
The engagement at a glance
The challenge
A business-critical inventory application with no documentation, nobody left who had built it, and a skill set the business could no longer hire.
What we did
Studied every table, form and report, reconstructed the architecture and workflows, and produced complete application-level documentation.
The application stayed. The people who built it, and the skill they used, did not.
The company is a diamond merchant in Los Angeles. In 1997, its own employees built an inventory management application on MS Access to run the business the way the business actually worked — its inventory, and the data it exchanged with external diamond trading websites.
The same employees upgraded and maintained the application for years. It became the system the business ran on. Then they left or retired — and by then, MS Access and VBA skills had become scarce and expensive to hire. The application carried on running the business, with nobody behind it.
By the time Softenger was brought in
Errors nobody could fix
The application was throwing 32-bit and 64-bit operating system errors, and there was no one left with the knowledge to trace them.
No documentation at any level
Nothing described the code, and nothing described the business workflows the application carried.
No one to ask, and no one to hire
TThe people who built and maintained it had gone, and their understanding went with them. Replacing that knowledge meant recruiting an MS Access and VBA skill set that had become scarce and expensive in the US market.
Connections nobody had recorded
The application exchanged data with external diamond trading websites, with no record of what moved, when, or why.
A system the business could not change
The company could not make a single change to the application its daily operations depended on.
Understand everything before changing anything
Softenger assigned two senior MS Access developers for three months. The work followed the first two phases of Softenger’s AOTS approach: advise, then support.
Studied the application in full
Every table, form and report was examined to establish what the application held and what each part of it did.
Reconstructed how it was built
The team established the application’s architecture: a multi-user design with the data held on a shared network drive and the forms and reports on each user’s machine.
Mapped the business workflows
The developers traced how the business actually used the application — the workflows built into it over the years, and why they were built that way.
Connected it to how the trade works
The workflows were tied back to how the diamond business moves data, including the exchanges between the application and the external trading websites.
Wrote it all down
The engagement produced complete application-level documentation, covering both the technical design and the business workflows.
The industry is specific. The talent gap isn’t
Swap diamonds for machine parts, pharmaceuticals or steel, and the story reads the same: an application built in-house years ago, and a skill set that has quietly become hard to hire. A few questions worth asking about your own application:
Was it built in-house, by people who have since left?
Could a new developer work from the documentation that exists today?
Has an Office or Windows update caused errors nobody could fix?
Does it exchange data with other systems in ways nobody has fully mapped?
Has the business stopped asking for changes because they feel too risky?
If more than one of these sounds familiar, the first conversation is worth thirty minutes.
Tell us about your application.
A 30-minute conversation about what your MS Access application does, what is breaking, and what it needs. If the answer is support rather than a rebuild, that is what we will tell you.