Automation

Today’s modern manufacturing facilities always employ some level of computerized control for insuring safety of people, the environment and assets. Redwood does not define or install control systems. We work with a select few implementation partners and control system vendors to assist clients with new controls or upgrades to their existing control systems. Learn more...

Integration

Manufacturing plants age, companies evolve and product life cycles change. As these realities come to pass, our clients often find themselves with a multitude of control systems and related hardware and software. Often a further level complexity is introduced when companies acquire and divest of productive capacity resulting in plants or divisions running completely different vendors, vintages and versions of systems. This complexity need not present a roadblock to effective integration of control system between each other or to plant business systems. The introduction of a process historian is an excellent means to consolidate data from your portfolio of applications and systems into a single data source. Historians offer a robust set of functionality to trending, analysis and display of plant data. The larger benefit from a data historian is in the ability to integrate process data from heterogeneous systems for comparison of engineering, product, lab, and transactional crew, materials and maintenance data within a single platform. Redwood consultants are experts in the selection, deployment and utilization of process data historians to provide your plant a single system of record for integrated plant operating parameters. Learn more...

Optimization

Doing more with less all the while increasing quality and velocity of execution is a reality of today’s global economy. Perhaps third world manufacturing does not offer the quality of products or stability of supply to be creditable competition to your manufacturing today – but one day soon they will. Western manufacturers must optimize their processes to complete with the lower cost, less regulated offshore supplier. Where our clients have developed their own offshore production capacity they also face a unique set of challenges in applying processes and procedures in a culturally different environment through an expat management team and local staff. In summary, if manufacturing processes are not optimized your competition at home and abroad are going to take away your customers. Learn more...

Competitive Analytics

Companies have been collecting and reporting on data for as long as there has been commerce. In the last fifty years computers have been used to store and report business data. Since 1982 personal computers have been available on the managers desktop to do analysis of business data to support the decision they make. In the last ten years we have seen businesses consolidate all there transactional information into enterprise suites of software like SAP.

What does it mean to compete with analytics? With many businesses offering the similar goods and services, a company’s use of its business data to seek a competitive advantage is one of the last remaining untapped means of differentiation.

Use of qualitative and statistical analysis to predict business results is a wining strategy in that it allows you to act on what you know and not on what you think you feel. Redwood’s consultants can help you use Competitive Analytics to focus on your most profitable activities and to identify the least profitable ones for corrective action.

Project Management

Information Technology projects present a challenge in control of costs and maintaining delivery schedules. A client once joked “when IT guys say one week I double it and increase the units by a factor. When IT says one week, I hear two months.” The tragic truth of this anecdote it that for many software implementations far too often he is correct. Cost overruns and delayed schedules are almost expected in the software industry.

Redwood’s Project Managers are senior resources who have implemented projects in industries just like yours. We recognize the uniqueness of your business and your requirements. But our experience allows us to recognize, early, the telltale signs of a project with poorly defined scope, improper controls or unrealistic timelines. No one benefits from a failed project and Redwood can provide you with Project Management expertise to ensure that possibility does not creep into your Information Technology projects.

Project Financing

Redwood senior management team has lines into Angel and VC funding community in western Canada. If you have just had that Eureka moment and now hold the next killer application give us a call. Just like you we want the world to be a better place as a result of your product or service. If you can convince our principals that you do know what you have we may be able to help by funding your project or putting you in touch with people who do have access to funds.

Offshore Software Development

Once, outsourcing software development was about “Let’s replace my guys with your guys and save some money.” But that is changing, at the local and global level.

Now the sentiment is: “Let’s outsource the software development and move my guys into client-facing and strategic roles that add more value to the organization.”

This leverages the experience of those who develop the software, either as a product for sale or as part of an overall solution, such as providing operations advice. It also simplifies getting their buy-in, since they don’t feel threatened and their jobs get richer and more interesting. By preserving the intellectual capital - its staff - the business enhances its intellectual property.

Redwood has experience in facilitating offshore development projects. Specifically, we work closely with a diverse team of software development professionals located in Bali. Learn more...