Project Scoping and Estimating:
Customers want help organizing their needs into projects so they can plan, seek project approval, and understand their risks.  Katana’s customer-centric approach helps by focusing first on listening and then facilitating dialogue about needs, issues, risks, and vision.  Katana’s first line of risk mitigation service to its customers is to provide focus and scope outline for each prospective project.  In this way, customers can gain clarity from an early estimate of the project definition, size, complexity, major risk factors, significant phases and a break out of prioritized features.  Each major feature can then be considered as a task area with its own priority, definition, relationship to all other task areas, and thorough time and cost development and/or integration estimate.  This early focus on project scoping and estimating inevitably leads to better project organization, scheduling, management, and outcome.

Custom Software Application Development:
Customers want to know their software project is being handled by highly skilled professionals but they also want to feel in control of the process.  Katana’s goal is to have each customer feel that they received the very best service and value for their investment in software development.  Our entire development process is geared to maximize communication and status transparency with our customers.  It starts with how we help define and scope projects interactively with customers.  The sense of customer control grows and leads to higher levels of satisfaction as we apply our unique ability to break complex projects into easy-to-review building-block size tasks.  Along the way our process looks for opportunities to provide automation for efficiency, new capabilities for effectiveness, and integration for optimum work flow.  Finally, we know that our customers are investing not just for today but in systems that will pave the way to their successful futures.  To add even more long term value, every Katana custom-fit solution always employs open and flexible designs that anticipate changes to business rules, work flow, and data over time and allows for reconfiguration to meet these changes.

Systems Integration: 
Perhaps the most common and difficult to solve problem in the Hospitality industry today is the proliferation of different systems that don’t integrate or talk to each other across the enterprise.  Katana’s skill at building custom-fit solutions helps our customers meet this integration challenge by creating bridges and exchange points for information at the business rule and data levels.  As a custom system designer, Katana brings the advantage of being able to work with existing systems to write code and design automated processes that bridge the gap between systems. Often the best solution is to build a new central data repository that can take useful but isolated data from many systems and provide a common organization and retrieval point.  This is often a very cost-effective way to preserve valuable legacy systems while defining and standardizing business rules for the entire organization at the new common data repository level.  Katana’s focus on integration solutions supported by custom design and development can often allow customers to gracefully phase out older systems while also planning for new or additional systems that can “plug-in” to the central repository down the road.