Supporting your ferry business

Software development

Software development lies at the heart of our business and we specialise in developing web based business enterprise systems.  With over 21 years experience, we've delivered hundreds of successful software engineering projects, providing a complete end to end service from specification and design, right through to implementation, hosting and on-going support.  Find out more about our software development services by visiting www.pdms.com. 

Consultancy

We understand technology and the business pressures of ferry operators and the maritime sector. So we ensure that you are well equipped to compete in your market, by making the best possible use of information assets and the capabilities of current technology, without excessive cost or business risk.

Our major strength lies in the diversity and experience of our consultancy team, combining considerable depth of technical knowledge with a high degree of business awareness.  This has been gained from many years experience of working with a wide range of businesses and organisations, so we cover a spectrum of industry sectors, technologies and platforms.

This means we can help your ferry business benefit from insight we've gained from solving a wide range of business challenges.

Our broad range of consultancy service include general management consultancy on related business issues such as moving services on-line, business process re-engineering and change management to infrastructure design and security.

We always aim to provide our customers with unbiased advice aimed solely at meeting their business goals.

Database administration

We have skilled and experienced database administrators who can help ensure that your solution is configured precisely to meet the specific needs of your business.  

PDMS are partners with both Oracle and Microsoft. 

First class deployment

Unlike many other software companies, we build all of our systems using a three step model of ‘testing’, ‘staging’ and ‘live’ phases, which means that we are able to iron out any crinkles in the development process before we even deploy your finished product. You can see the full system right from design to launch, and log in at any time to see how progress is going or to test the system from a usability perspective.

Using a sequence of testing, reviewing, more user testing, quality assurance, data conversion and migration and then finally deployment, we ensure that you are completely happy before switching our system on. Our deployment process is also fully secure, so that only we and you can access work in progress.

You also have a flexible choice of hosting and support services, so you can choose to either host your solution on premise, or have it fully managed by our expert infrastructure team. 

We work in partnership with you to fine tune your software, implementing it to meet your exact requirements.

Hosting and disaster recovery

At PDMS we can provide our advanced ferry reservations, ticketing and fares modelling software systems on a fully managed service basis so you don't need to worry about infrastructure, hosting or data and disaster recovery.

We can help you to reduce your infrastructure hardware, licence and support costs by providing a fully hosted managed service, with:

•    Servers co-located at one of our two world class data centres
•    Security including routing, firewall and reverse proxy devices
•    A fully licenced operating system and database software
•    Comprehensive backup and archive services
•    A regular patching and monitoring service
•    Full disaster recovery to help protect your business and customers

Our managed services are supported by a Service Level Agreement giving you additional re-assurance. This service includes comprehensive management information covering uptime system performance and, where appropriate, usage patterns and web analytics.

Infrastructure and hardware support

The PDMS Infrastructure Team has a wide range of technical expertise in servers (including virtualisation), databases, networks, operating systems and telecommunications. They also have in in-depth knowledge of both Oracle and Microsoft products.

The team provides a vital role in setting up and managing PDMS' internal business systems and development and staging environments for our client's projects. They also ensure that our client's systems are hosted securely, reliably and efficiently and can provide our clients with advice on infrastructure related issues and best practices.

We can also provide support for hardware associated with our Compass ferry reservations, ticketing and fares modelling software systems.

Ticket monitoring and resolution

Our ferry ticket monitoring and resolution support services ensure that cashups from remote ticket machines around the network are collected and uploaded to your central database.  So for example, if a network connection is lost to a remote port there may be missing cashups, so we will notify customer services and ensure they are retrieved when back online.

Flexible training to suit the needs of your team

PDMS provides flexible training options to suit you and your organisation, to help you get the most out of your ferry software solution – whether it be for our Reservations, Ticketing, Statistics or Fares and Timetable Modelling system.

Types of training include:

• Comprehensive user guides
• Onsite training courses
• Remote training via video conference
• Train the trainer course