Web Development (E-Commerce)
The Internet continues to change the business landscape and so your company's web presence must continually be evolving. Our Web Development solutions will provide you with the strategic web enhancements required to ensure that your Internet presence is providing your company with a real competitive advantage.

An Internet site connecting your business to the world and creating a dominant presence for your company; An Intranet linking your enterprise, enabling employees to share information and access self-service capabilities to decrease costs and improve productivity; Or an Extranet directly connecting you to your customers, partners and suppliers to help you respond faster to all their needs -- Touchwood has the experience and expertise to create and deliver your custom e-business solution.

Let us show you how you can:

• Find new customers and drive them to your site.
• Web-enable your internal applications and increase productivity.
• Get new products and services to the market much faster.
• Increase profits through on-line transactions.
• Protect customers through the use of secure transactions.
• Interact with customers effectively to improve customer satisfaction.

At Touchwood, we offer a full suite of internet/intranet consulting and web development services:

• Internet/Intranet application planning and development
• Web Site Development
• e-Commerce / Micro-sites
• Web based catalogs
• Web Enabling of legacy applications

Custom Application Development
Choosing an off-the-shelf technology solution can feel at times like fitting a square peg in a round hole. Even with a menu of available technology options, the off-the-shelf applications may not offer the feature set that will fit your specific business requirements. At those times, your organization needs a custom application that will address the uniqueness and the context of your business.

When your business needs are unique, we work with your organization to design and develop custom applications. We provide custom application services that span the entire life cycle of the application, from gathering the initial business requirements to the final stages of implementation. The defining characteristics of our custom application services are its:

• Proven and repeatable methodology
• Unbiased viewpoint for utilizing the most appropriate technology
• Ability to integrate with existing systems
• Flexibility in leveraging the IT capabilities of your organization

Sometimes the best package solutions just don't quite meet the business needs. In this case, custom development may be necessary to align business requirements with Information Technology. Through a proven methodology, Touchwood Technologies can deliver a custom application that fits your business needs in an on-time, on-budget approach.

Consulting Services
To help our clients amid the complexity, we provide ClientEdge consulting services - a methodology-based approach of applying innovation, best practices, and seasoned industry expertise to the business problems of the client. Our consulting services address how to define the strategy and business processes of the organization and how to use technology to carry out the strategy and processes.

Touchwood will help you align technology with your business plan. We work with you to understand your business challenges, define your objectives, evaluate your current capabilities and assess the competitive market in order to design a technology strategy to achieve your business goals efficiently while producing maximum return on your investment.

Touchwood can provide an in-depth evaluation for any ongoing or planned IT endeavor. The assessment and resulting action plan may include technical and business requirement determination; resource utilization; future needs; risk factors and more to ensure the success of your IT project.

A comprehensive IT strategy allows clients to:

• Leverage technology to meet specific business needs and goals
• Achieve more efficient and effective operations by gaining a clear articulation of strategic options, as well as associated cost/benefit analysis and organizational impact assessment for each
• Reduce costs, minimize risk and better leverage available resources by considering both short- and long-term options
• Maximize value derived from technology solutions by identifying potential new technologies that meet business needs and goals
• Accelerate implementation of the strategy by having a clear roadmap of the recommended architectures and an implementation plan
• Reduce redundant processes by maximizing value derived out of technology investments

Database Management
Custom Acquisitions, evolving technologies, new management agendas and changing business objectives have a significant impact on company information systems and supporting technologies - many developed to meet the specific and immediate business needs of a particular unit or department. An isolated view of business can result, and this inhibits productivity enhancements and impedes the flow of enterprise information necessary to make informed business decisions. Many companies lack deep and comprehensive query and reporting capabilities, and have limited ability to deliver timely data and information to all levels within the organization.

Properly managed data helps companies avoid inconsistencies and discrepancies that lead to poor business decisions. As companies strive to gain intelligence from their corporate information, it is critical that technologies and processes are designed and developed to access, clean, and validate the data, while consistently surfacing the data to the right user communities. Sophisticated data management skills, in conjunction with sound database architecture, form the foundation of Touchwood Technologies solutions. The following are services performed by the Touchwood Data Management team:

• Business Rule Definition
• Data Warehousing
• Data Cleansing
• Distributed Databases, Enterprise Architecture and Legacy Data Sources
• Performance Tuning
• Database Administration
• Database Design
• Information Engineering, Including Modeling and Architectures
• Conversion, Data Loading, and Import / Export (ETL/ETT)
• Business Intelligence
• Reporting and Data Presentation

Business Intelligence allows the surfacing of data based on the specific information needs of individuals and their business requirements, and is supported by tools that take into account market or business context, allow personalization and support both ad hoc and drill down methods of access. Applications that deliver high-impact Business Intelligence can yield dramatic improvements in decision-support services and tangible ROI:

• Demonstrate cost benefit and cost savings in maximizing data and processes through business case and ROI-based vendor analysis
• Make more effective business decisions, which can equate to increased revenue, reduced costs and improved competitive advantage
• Optimize business processes, leading to reduced costs
• Improve customer support and create higher levels of customer satisfaction through a more informed workforce
• Reduce development costs and hardware/software overhead through development and deployment of more economical data marts

Touchwood develops powerful Business Intelligence solutions that turn operational data into actionable information by helping our clients go through the four steps to better customer relationships (Extract, Analyze, Plan, Act):

• Developing a strategy to help clients leverage current data to maximize its value, and to ensure that the right data gets into the hands of the right people
• Integrating leading Business Intelligence tools from Cognos with heterogeneous source applications
• Developing custom Business Intelligence software applications
• Identifying the best methods to extract and cleanse source data
• Designing a data mart or data warehouse that supports relevant reporting and querying requirements
• Facilitating access to Business Intelligence solutions via intuitive, Web-enabled channels, such as portals and management dashboards, and enhancing presentation formats through the use of graphical outputs and on-demand spreadsheets

Business Services
The Touchwood Technologies' team offers a combination of marketing and technical experts to actively work with you on all aspects of sales, marketing and customer service projects. We call this consulting service "Client Edge", and we can help give your company a competitive edge by offering services during all phases of improvement including:

• Strategic consulting to assist with the planning stages for email, business intelligence and web enhancement initiatives
• Assistance with the creative and copywriting
• Assistance in building a Strategic Marketing Plan for your company
• Assistance in creating a Strategic Business Intelligence plan for your company
• Building data warehouses and data marts from your existing transactional data
• Deployment services to assist with implementation of our email, business intelligence and web products and services
• Both end user and administrator training for all the products and services we sell
• Post deployment services including ongoing support and maintenance
• Custom modifications of our products to fit your specific needs
• When warranted, complete custom software applications to accommodate your specific requirements

Our solutions team also has a vast array of experience in other areas of expertise. Please email us at solutions@touchwoodtech.com if you have a project needing assistance in an area not detailed here.