Solve

The Customer

Solve was created by a fire and security business — a company that installs, maintains and monitors fire, CCTV, intruder alarm and access-control systems across customer sites. They went looking for software to run their operation and found nothing that fit, so they built their own. Solve is the result: a product shaped by people who do the work every day, now being made available to other businesses. It wears its fire and security origins openly, but it's built to suit any business that follows a quote–install–service–invoice workflow.

The Problem

Nothing on the market fit. The available software was priced for the enterprise, weighed down by complexity that got in the way more than it helped, and wrapped in an unfriendly, outdated interface. Yet the business processes are nuanced and complex, with work flowing from quote, to install, to ongoing service under recurring maintenance and monitoring contracts, callout visits and invoicing — fanning out across multiple customers and system types, and meeting the needs of both field engineers and office staff. So the bar was set in two directions at once: powerful enough to absorb that complexity, yet simple enough for anyone to learn and feel at home in a day.

The Solution

Solve is built on top of the battle-tested, production-ready platform of microservices that forms the backbone of every S16 project. Combined with our S16-Developer software, which generates the core app and service architecture from project-specific entity definitions, the development team were able to focus all their attention on what the customer really cared about: a friendly interface and robust business processes.

We created a bespoke interface for handling customers, quotations, contracts, callouts and invoicing, and a field interface built around a scheduling calendar — with role-based access keeping administrators, office users and engineers each to their own application areas. A workflow pipeline threads the entities together so a quotation becomes a contract, a contract spawns jobs, jobs become scheduled visits, and visits feed invoicing, with nothing lost in between. Engineers are dispatched from a resource-timeline calendar and are able to capture visit details including images and signatures through their dedicated visit interface.

Underneath, it's fully serverless — React, AWS Lambda, MongoDB — provisioned as infrastructure-as-code with Terraform across three environments and shipped through CI/CD on every push.

The S16 Difference

Two things set Solve apart. The first is where it came from. It wasn't specced by a software vendor guessing at the industry — it was built by the operators who live this workflow every day, so the hard-won details that generic tools miss are simply baked in. And because its fire and security character was kept deliberately light rather than hard-wired, the same product drops cleanly into any business that quotes, installs, services and invoices — electrical, heating, lift maintenance and beyond.

The second is how it's built. Using S16's config-driven generation software, the whole app and service come from one source-of-truth configuration, and as requirements evolve, new entities, fields and screens spring from a config update and a rebuild. It runs on S16's proven serverless architecture rather than infrastructure reinvented from scratch — which is what let a complete, multi-role platform stand up quickly and run at low cost.