Consulting Services

Reducing risk

Operational Research projects, specially the ones related to optimization, are generally high risk projects. Our consulting services exists to reduce the risk of operational research projects and to make every project using our technology a success story.

Our consultants are prepared to guide, assist and advice you through the whole development cycle of operational research projects. With their support you'll always get the best out of our products.

We can develop complete applications, or we can support you in any phase of the development process.

Please contact our sales department to get more information.

Proof of Concept

One strategy to reduce the risk is creating a proof of concept (PoC).

A PoC is an application that contains the principal features of your future project. The PoC can be the starting point or a part of the final application.

Our sales department can advice you about the best way to work together, either creating a PoC, a closed project or using our support services.

The Development Process

The first step is to create a model of your business and collect requirements. Then we'll propose some solutions, and together we'll select the most appropriate to base the project on.

After that, it will begin an iterative development process of the application, at least two iterations. Our development process is a spiral model in which we analyse requirements and results, design, implement, test, and again, analyse, design, implement, test, an so on, until we're both satisfied with the results.

At all time we'll keep you informed of the whole process in a weekly report. This report will contain information about the current status of the project, the chargeable hours of the week and the current draft of the final report.

Deliverables

Generally, the result of the consulting services are:

• A report with all the information of the project
  
• The source code developed with the corresponding technical documentation

The report and the code will be delivered as a Python source distribution. The project report will be in the doc folder and the source code will be fully documented so that you can read the technical documentation using pydoc or your favourite source documentation browser.

Duration and Payment

The duration of a project can't be estimated accurately until we've decided its scope. But we recommend to divide projects in small phases of three or four months. The idea is to create a working application in the first phase, and to add functionality in future phases.

If we decide to create a closed project or a PoC, we'll stablish a fixed price and conditions. The price will be computed using an hourly rate listed in our price list.

Notice that the price of consulting is by hour, not by resource/hour.

License of the Report and Source Code

The report will be released under the GNU Free Documentation License and the source code will be released under the MIT License.