Extending your IT department

Todd Grigsby, who founded TGE Software, spent ten years as Sr. Systems Architect at Retail Pro International. He did hands-on development on Retail Pro 8 and Retail Pro 9, and wrote the first version of their Prism RPS REST server from scratch.

He holds Retail Pro Prism certification as Systems Engineer and as Applications Expert.

That is the difference between a partner who is reading the customization API documentation and one who remembers why it works that way.

It also means the answer to “can Retail Pro do this?” is usually a specific yes or a specific no, delivered in one conversation rather than after a discovery phase.

Customizations

Right out of the box, Retail Pro’s products, like most point of sale systems, are vanilla. We create plug-ins and utilities for Retail Pro 8, 9, and Prism to tailor your customer management, employee management, inventory, sales, and third party service integrations to suit your business needs.

Integrations

A feed from legacy software into a cloud service. Sales and inventory pushed into accounting. An old database opened up as a set of services. Data pulled out of the system you are leaving and into the one you are adopting.

Porting to new technologies

Legacy systems are reliable right up until nobody is left who can work on them. Reimplement in a language people still hire for, or reimagine the whole thing as a cloud application — and pick up localization, encryption, secure automatic updates, scalability, instrumentation, and an open API on the way.

Web and social applications

Something more involved than an informative site with a contact form: a platform, a product, or a connection into one that already exists.

Project management

New projects, and projects that had gone completely off the rails. Agile methods used without crushing the people doing the work.

On every project we make heavy use of source control: feature branches, test and release branches, automated merging, cloud-hosted repositories. That means your investment is safeguarded — our entire operation could burn to the ground and the source code would be safe — and it means the process of building is faster and less risky.

The same applies to testing. Unit test frameworks and test-driven design, API testing, UI testing, containerized automated runs, performance testing, and a pipeline that ties them together.

Two things work against a system that simply behaves: time lost to repetitive tasks that invite human error, and regression. Continuous integration is the discipline of refusing to pay for either one twice.