Services we love solving complex
and difficult problems

We are generalists with interdisciplinary expertise; while software itself is applicable to any field of endeavour. Our scientific mindset can solve a huge array of diverse and intersecting problems, particularly as it is coupled with business experience. If you can dream it, we can probably do it!

Here, we list some of what we do, broadly grouped by category. 

Explain

We can analyse, test-hypotheses, investigate, diagnose, and then communicate the results lucidly, across all levels of the business:

  • Executive Coaching: what keeps you awake at night? Senior positions can be lonely: who does a CEO phone to bounce ideas off, and chat to, and ask for unbiased, confidential advice, background information, or for independent research? Let us help.
  • Teaching: we love to help and inspire people. Many of us have an academic background, teaching professionally, or doing educational-outreach. For example, executive-coaching, democratising digital, learn-to-code, electronics.
  • Agile Coaching: we use the agile methodology in everything we do, and, having trained many team-members, we can teach others. We have a highly successful track-record of agile project-management, delivering at large-scale.
  • Mathematical Modelling: we can develop and run mathematical models, from simple to sophisticated, with appropriate levels of precision. We first identify the essential factors, remove extraneous details, and calculate the order-of-magnitude, and the error-bars, to determine the fundamental behaviour of the system; then we refine it. We use calculus, or numerical-methods for optimisation and constraint problems. By using python, we avoid the pitfalls of spreadsheets.
  • Statistical Tests: we can help you gather and analyse data to test your hypotheses, gain insights, and reach well-evidenced conclusions.
  • Science Experiments: we can investigate new ideas, do calculations, design and build experimental test rigs, make measurements, and produce prototypes. For a new concept, we can actually test, quickly, whether the main idea is sound: will it function, and will it scale? We've looked at improving the manufacture of titanium; measured the efficiency of backlights; and investigated the effect of frost on the sweetness of Brussels sprouts.
  • Renewable Energy: it is critical that the world moves faster to address climate-change. We need to halve CO2 emissions, while at the same time, to bring the whole world up to modern living standards, energy production must increase 5-fold. This means we need to be 10× better producing energy without fossil-fuels: "small changes" won't do it. We can help, advise, and evaluate the feasibility of different designs and proposals.
  • Energy Saving: with climate-change and energy costs, efficiency is critical. For example, directly radiated heat from a glowing-element (at the optimal temperature), can have higher efficacy than warm-air; heat-pumps are often better than burners. But most people's intuition about energy is wrong: unplugging phone chargers and turning off monitors is a distraction from the bigger CO2 culprits such as wasted-heat, or muda of excess-transportation.
  • Artificial Intelligence: (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and Vector Databases with Embeddings can be bewildering! All companies know that they must engage with this revolution, but few know how, or where to begin.
  • Learning New Things: we, ourselves, are constantly curious. This is the wellspring that keeps our knowledge relevant, our insights fresh, and our adaptability well-honed. We can share what we know, and, on request, research anything we don't.

Advise

We can provide specific, detailed, implementable advice, based on our experience. For example:

  • Trusted Partnership: let us be your long-term trusted partner whom you can call at any time, and we'll help you solve your problems. We will give you an unbiased, confidential, and complete answer, supported by data and references, and we can carry out independent research if needed. Intellectual honesty is an ethical imperative: we'll tell you if we don't know, and we'll always give you the full picture.
  • Technical Evaluation: we can offer an independent technical evaluation, or audit, of any product, process, or company, especially regarding software, physics, engineering or mathematics. We can explain complex ideas by analogy, while having the technical depth to create a credible, defensible and well-referenced report. This due-diligence can be useful to lawyers, venture-capitalists, investors, consultants, and as expert-witnesses.
  • Digital Transformation: we can help with strategic, technical, digital, and cultural transformation of your business, democratising digital, and empowering your people to increase productivity.
  • Diagnostics: Go and See, to Understand Deeply. We have years of experience seeing business contexts and applications through a digital lens to solve problems, and identify the art of the possible. This is the key role of the "Translator", as defined by McKinsey. Our practical skills, honed in the demanding logistics sector, can be applied to your business and your problems.
  • Urgent Responses: when a technical crisis occurs, ask us to help: we have the experience to quickly grasp the entire situation, identify the root-cause, list options, and propose and communicate a solution. We can usually provide hands-on help solving it.
  • Interim and Non-Exec Roles: we can take on these roles for you; advise on strategy; and help you to specify, evaluate, test, and interview suitable candidates.
  • Team Building: we can help you to recruit, evaluate, hire, train, inspire, maintain and lead a team of talented experts, in a fantastic culture. We've done it before.
  • Software Design: data-structures, library and platform selection, design for agile build and test, how best to leverage existing open-source libraries and infrastructure, scaleability, database design. Our experience can help you bootstrap a successful design, validate an existing plan, and overcome challenging constraints.
  • Data Science: we can advise on the right approaches, data-science algorithms, and 6σ methodology to ensure you succeed. Different contexts require different tools.
  • Cyber Security: how to think like an adversary: “how would I break x ?” Attacks range from social-engineering, to sophisticated technical attacks on hardware and comms, we can do penetration-testing, training, compliance, and cryptography, and evaluate your threat-models and disaster-recovery plans. We care about privacy and digital-rights.
  • Infrastructure and Networking: cloud (local, hybrid, private/public); storage solutions; IPv6 networking, VPNs; WiFi performance, security and debugging; end-to-end encryption and SSL standards; centralised account management. We can also help with performance, and custom requirements.
  • Automation, for increased employee productivity and bandwidth: process-automation, API interfaces, electronic data interchange (EDI), robotic process automation (RPA) and automated reporting; hardware automation, automated testing, and robotics.
  • Avoiding Mistakes: technology is amazing, but there are some cases of vendors who over-claim, over-price, hype, fall-for-their-own-marketing, deceive themselves, and occasionally just lie. We can be your friendly skeptics.

Do

Unlike some consultancies, who stop at advice, we can actually deliver and implement solutions, either ourselves or alongside your team:

  • Website Development: we can design, build, and host websites, from simple information sites to complex transactional database-driven systems, and even warehouse-management systems. This includes responsive design, mobile-apps (Android/iOS), and PWAs (progressive web apps). We value technical correctness, ease-of-use, user-interface, and user-experience.
  • e-Commerce: both the web-based shop-front and the warehouse back end, using WooCommerce, Magento, or Odoo, including 3rd-party API-integration, and data-analytics.
  • Bespoke Software Development: we can create bespoke applications, for specific customers and tasks. Our UX/UI experience optimises the interface, and creates an excellent workflow. We use open-source libraries to minimise the underlying cost, while maximising quality.
  • Data Science and Data Engineering: we can design, build, interface-with and host all the data-tools, combining data-engineering and data-science with statistical techniques and the 6σ tools for real-world process improvement. We use Python (especially NumPy/SciPy) for analysis, together with Plotly, and Superset for visualisation, and TensorFlow for machine learning.
  • Workflow: custom applications for decision-support and process-workflow. For example, HR and Health & Safety have well-codified business rules.
  • Reverse Engineering and support of legacy technologies. For example, we supported an expensive (£0.25m) precision steel laser-cutter, whose control system only runs on Windows XP (and needs a hardware-token), which needed a new PC, and modern network security. We can do data-recovery on hard-drives and USB devices (even with clean-room disassembly, and chip replacement), using dd-rescue to recover the data in multiple-passes.
  • Open Source Services: installation, configuration, management, packaging, customisation, and maintenance of 3rd party applications. We can also develop new features, interfaces, and extensions i.e. a 'bug bounty'.
  • OpenStack: is a private cloud: as powerful and flexible as Azure/AWS, but retaining privacy and control, and potentially reducing costs to below ½. OpenStack is used by HP, RackSpace, Walmart and CERN, and we have many years' experience, and an expert team. We also run a lot of open-source infrastructure on it, from the warehouse management systems and data-science frameworks, to our business core-tools (CRM, email, wiki, file-share, documents), giving us a fully private, secure, and low-cost ecosystem.
  • Open Source Infrastructure: we have substantial practical expertise in running, hosting, interfacing, and customising these open-source programs, and using them for our own development and production infrastructure: Debian, Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP, Postfix, OpenSSH, Icinga, Puppet, FreeIPA, Keycloak, Git, Gitea, Jenkins, Django, Bootstrap, jQuery, React, and others.
  • Business in a Box: we run our own business on open source infrastructure, because it's better; more trustworthy; private; easier to use and deploy; we can customise it; and significantly lower-cost, with there are no license fees. We can deploy the same tools we ourselves use, for you, including: MediaWiki, RT, Nextcloud, Taiga, SuiteCRM, Roundcube, WordPress, Wagtail, Jitsi, BigBlueButton, Moodle, Zulip.
  • Linux on Desktop, and Open Source Applications: network-provisioned desktop Linux provides a vast set of powerful applications; much lower cost; better performance; better security; ease of management; and can extend the lifetime of older equipment. We recommend Ubuntu LTS, and are familiar with Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian variants.
  • GPT, AI and Large Language Models: A.I. is currently taking the world by storm, with huge potential. We can add A.I. to your products and processes, to improve productivity, either using a 3rd party service, or a local model for better privacy. Llama 3 and RAG (retrieval augmented generation, with vector databases) allows you to use your own data, while keeping it private.
  • Proprietary Technologies: we can use, run, and interoperate with proprietary tools and platforms, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Azure, AWS, Oracle, SAP, and Google Suite. We are experienced with data migration to open platforms.
  • Financial reporting, automation, and integration: for example, automation of the daily transfer of data between CRS EPOS and Sage 50 via the API.
  • Electronics: circuit and PCB design, prototyping, testing, small-scale production, and design for scale-out. We enjoy electronics, varying from simple sensors, I2C, SPI and USB computer interfaces, NFC, microcontrollers such as the Arduino and ESP32, to larger systems like the Raspberry Pi, and embedded mini-ITX computers.
  • Sensors and IOT: networked Internet of Things devices, such as warehouse temperature monitors, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) ranging, coupled with Node-RED dashboards.
  • Engineering Prototypes and Fixtures: we create jigs and fixtures, using CAD, 3D-printing, and more traditional tools, to test out ideas and make devices for problem-solving.

Products

These are Telos Digital's products: things we have built and can customise for you:

  • ToPiC: the Tracker of Performance and Improved Confidence is a tool we created to improve the appraisal process and obtain better outcomes, by improving cultural behaviour.

If this meets a requirement, or sparks an idea, please contact us: we'd be delighted to help solve your problems.