A hundred-year-old company had a quoting system built in 2000 on Microsoft Access. The products and their features have complex interdependencies, and the original implementation took a year.
The platform is now being forced into obsolescence, so it had to be replaced.
What we did instead of migrating
Rather than trying to migrate the entire system, we looked at the nature of the data and what the business actually needed, built an appropriate prompt, handed it over with some screenshots, and sat back.
An hour later – AI time, not ours; one of us went and had dinner – the finished product was already 90% of what was needed.
There was one error, and it came from a lack of clarity in the prompt rather than from the tool. The old system needed quote and envelope layouts edited by hand – in 2000 everything was printed – and we wanted a drag-and-drop visual editor. What arrived was a simple text editor for the text elements alone. One new prompt and another hour fixed it, and that single feature was as large a task as the rest of the project put together.
The total investment
- Roughly 30 minutes of human time – crafting the prompt and cropping screenshots, plus the second prompt to fix the editor
- Pennies of compute, against a monthly subscription that was already being paid
What they have now is an open-source stack – PostgreSQL with a web front end – that is close to infinitely adjustable. We have since added product images, email, pick tickets, and whatever else has been asked for. Next is tying it into their CRM, accounting and ERP.
That last part is the real change: when adding a feature is this cheap, the question stops being “can we justify it” and becomes “what else would help”.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our AI integration work deals with – talk to us about yours.
