Excelpoint’s Managing Director Ian Brown, alongside his colleague and Business Consultant, Oliver Warren.
We live in a connected world. Technology has transformed the way people live, shop and do business. Today, even the smallest business will be running more than one software application and if they don’t talk to each other, then they have a big problem.
Just imagine how time-consuming and tedious it would be to enter the same information into an accounting package, a contracts management program and a CRM system. Yet that is the daily reality for thousands of businesses throughout the country large and small.
A Newton Aycliffe business has exploited this opportunity to great effect and has grown substantially as a result over the last 10.
Excelpoint, which has its headquarters in the Evans Business Centre, is one of the North-East’s best-kept secrets. It started in Bradford in 1983 as producer of low-level software. And now its advanced software is used globally in a variety of sectors including health, construction, defence, not for profit and the public sector. It’s a global player in a sector that’s been conservatively estimated to be worth £100 billion.
Managing director Ian Brown explains: “Our software is straightforward, easy to configure, secure and is far more cost effective than the traditional software packages businesses have been using for the past 20 years.”
Ian, whose first job was as an analyst programmer for GEC Telecommunications, knows all about bespoke software working with it for more than two decades before taking the reins at Excelpoint.
He saw how businesses used an inefficient mixture of bespoke and off-the-shelf packages, such as back office because that was the established paradigm. But the growth of internet commerce and the shift online meant the traditional way of doing things was outmoded.
While he was working as a software developer for another company, Ian heard about Excelpoint’s plans. Initially, he invested in the idea and shortly afterwards received an offer to come and run it.
Ian explains: “I could see the opportunities web-based products would offer and Excelpoint’s software can easily grow with a business. I knew we could connect all types of data and I could see that we would be able to create a system that would enable clients to create bespoke business system solutions without writing a line of bespoke code.”
Excelpoint’s different solution to many businesses perennial problems was to create a software platform so flexible that it has all the benefits of a bespoke system but without any of the drawbacks such as high maintenance and on-going costs.
Minova Global produces mining equipment, parts and materials supplied to mining organisations on five different continents and 25 countries. The blue-chip mining conglomerate chose Excelpoint to help it improve its pipeline visibility in order to support market penetration, management decisions and increase supply efficiency.
Peter Assinder, Minova’s global lead of strategic marketing and technology, commented: “The level of understanding and flexibility that the Excelpoint team brought to our project, with minimal input from ourselves and therefore minimal disruption, was unlike experiences with other vendors.”
Excelpoint’s users can create their own bespoke systems in real time and deploy them across their workforces.
Recently, the massive regulatory shake-up caused by GDPR has seen a big spike in demand for Excelpoint’s software with companies large and small relying on its platform to ensure their compliance.
