With just four employees, Windsor-based jet engine hardware distributor Turbine Support Services doesn’t have the staff to undertake time-consuming projects.
Tracking company production and other figures is important, but the manual reporting process was tedious and inefficient.
So Vice President Matt Tomalonis turned to Triple Helix Corp. in Windsor, a software and information management company which helps companies leverage their business data to their best advantage.
Tomalonis said he asked Triple Helix President CEO Jason Bittner to create a touch-screen visual board to track company production.
“All production and customer orders, and our internal performance matrix, it’s all tracked through that now,” Tomalonis said of the visual board known as the 3XC-VUE, for Visual User Experience. “It streamlined our processes and improved our accuracy. You don’t have to print reports anymore. We printed 20 to 30 reports a week, and now it’s all at your fingertips on one board.”
Tomalonis said the 3XC-VUE serves as an interface with its Enterprise Resource Planning system, which tracks the company’s inventory, certifies its parts, does accounting and keeps customer vendor records.
Bittner said the 3XC-VUE system, like others his firm creates, helps companies easily access their data and bring exactly what they need to the forefront.
“They can walk up to, in their case, a 60-inch wide screen monitor, and touch it,” he said of Turbine Support Service’s 3XC-VUE. “They can click on the box for tomorrow, and it gives them a very easy way to look ahead and interface data.”
Bittner said Triple Helix, which also creates and hosts business websites, helps companies work with and interpret mountains of data.
“The challenge is that data is largely decentralized,” he said. “You have lots and lots of it, and how do you make sense of it? We help them organize it so they know where it is and what it is.”
Once the data is centrally located, Triple Helix products can find relationships within the data to help the client meet specific goals. Bittner said through a process he calls knowledge discovery, Triple Helix can help businesses discover and locate what is important to them.
“These products are the closest thing to a computer program that thinks the way a human thinks,” he said. “They emerge useful things. If I’m a retailer and I want to find who my best customer is, it might not be the one who buys lots of expensive items; it might be someone who’s buying a lot of small items that end up being the latest hot product.”
Triple Helix — with clients in the aerospace, financial and manufacturing industries in Connecticut, New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C. — can help clients “tell a story” with an enormous amount of data.
“On the manufacturing side, for example, they collect data about materials — how much they need, when they buy it, and the process of building it,” Bittner said. “There is a story in there that we can uncover with our software, and that story tells them how to make it better and cheaper and faster. It can tell you, ‘This supplier is costing too much money.’”
Bittner said potential clients are often surprised at the low cost of this technology.
“Most of our software solutions are well under a million dollars,” he said. “We leverage a lot of what we call open source technologies, in terms of software that is freely available to the public. Our prices are therefore extremely competitive. We don’t reinvent the wheel when we don’t have to.”
Triple Helix is also helping companies and organizations with website creation and hosting. At the Community Action Agency of New Haven, a social services agency which served over 15,000 people in the greater New Haven area last year, IT Manager Al Grimm said the agency hired Triple Helix to create its website, a task which posed some challenges.
“We were looking for a website that communicated effectively with a number of different constituency groups — our customers, our partners and our staff, and then the broader community,” Grimm said.
Triple Helix first created a wire frame website model, tested by focus groups.
“We had people click through the wire frame and show us where they would go to look for certain pieces of information,” Grimm said.
When the website was near completion, Grimm recalled, Triple Helix created the site on its own server and gave the agency access to it before it was live, so the agency could see how it worked. The firm also created a content management system so that Grimm can assign specific web pages to certain users.
“They can make changes and then submit them for publication,” Grimm said. “We can click a ‘Go Live’ button and that new content goes out without me having to micromanage it.”
Bittner said the potential for Triple Helix’s software solutions are limitless. With a very strong response to the 3XC-VUE, released in September, he said the company is in talks with several new potential clients, including the government for national defense and security purposes, as well as insurance and healthcare companies.
