Modernisation roadmap for a parts wholesaler's 2007 order system

Situation

An industrial parts wholesaler in Hanau, 45 staff, about €14 million in annual revenue, supplying fasteners and fittings to manufacturers along the Main. Every order, every stock movement and every price list ran through a system a former employee built in 2007 on a Microsoft Access front end with a SQL Server database. He retired in 2022. A customer web portal from 2014, written in PHP, sat on top and read from the same database at night.

Nobody in the building could change either system. A price-list change took a freelancer three days to locate. The server ran an operating system that stopped receiving updates in 2023. The owner had one quote for a new ERP at about €250,000 and two years, and no way to judge whether that was the answer or a reflex.

Approach

Assessment of two systems at a fixed price of €7,900. A clear picture before any rewrite or migration. We read the code, all 60,000 lines of it, with AI-assisted tooling that let us map the whole thing in the first two weeks instead of two months. We interviewed the four people who use the system most and watched them work for a morning each.

The deliverables were three documents. A code audit in plain words: what the system does, which parts are sound, which parts nobody should touch, and where the business rules live that exist nowhere else. A dependency map: 14 components, from the database driver to the label printer, with the 4 that are out of vendor support marked in red. And an options paper with three costed paths.

Option one, contain: move the database to a supported server, wrap the Access front end so it keeps running for five more years, about €18,000. Option two, staged renewal: rebuild the order module as a web application first, keep stock and pricing on the old system until they can follow, about €90,000 over 18 months in three fixed-price stages. Option three, standard ERP: the €250,000 quote, adjusted to about €140,000 once we removed modules the company would never use.

Two fixes could not wait, and we did them inside the assessment: the nightly portal sync had no error alert, and the backup had been silently failing for seven weeks.

Result

In this scenario the owner chose option two, with the server move from option one done first. The company had a written plan, a risk ranking, and three prices instead of one, and the decision took a week instead of a year. The retired developer’s knowledge now exists on paper. The backup works again.

What it cost

€7,900 fixed price, quoted before the work started, for the code audit, dependency map and options paper across two systems, plus the two immediate fixes. Any new server or licence the client buys as a result is a third-party cost, excluded from the guarantee. The assessment is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery, and for a monthly retainer the first month is refundable in full.

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