Right tool
The right tool, not the biggest one
Sometimes a two-hour change removes the problem that a six-month platform would only manage. We will say which we think it is, including when the smaller answer is worth less to us.
About
A project engineer who builds software.
That order is the whole point. The process gets understood first, by someone who has had to live inside it, and the software follows from that.
Background
Dataflow Solutions is led by Richard Ferretti, founder and lead consultant.
The work behind this business came from a decade inside heavy asset maintenance at a major Australian rail operator, as a project engineer: planning maintenance work, scoping it, costing it, and answering for whether it got delivered. It is an environment with genuine consequences: safety obligations that are audited, budgets that are scrutinised, and assets that fail expensively when planning is wrong.
It is also an environment that runs on an enormous amount of manual effort. Not through incompetence, but through accumulation: processes that were reasonable when they were designed, still being performed by hand years after the systems around them changed.
Building the tools to remove that effort was never the job description. It became the work that mattered most: nine tools now in production across four business units, recognised through six internal award nominations from five different nominators across four years. Dataflow Solutions exists to do that deliberately, for organisations that have the same problem and no one inside with the time or the inclination to solve it.
Alongside that sits a decade of building software properly: production web applications, native desktop and Android apps, AI systems that read documents and do real work, and a self-hosted infrastructure of around forty containerised services that has to keep running without anyone watching it. The consultancy work and the engineering are not separate things.
How we work
Four commitments.
Handover
Built to be handed over
Documented, owned by your team, and yours to change. Where you would rather we kept hosting it, ran the AI side of it, or stayed on to extend it, we are glad to. The difference is that it stays a decision you make, not a lock you find later.
Honesty
Told what we actually think
Including when the honest answer is that the saving will not cover the build, or that the problem is a process one and no software will fix it. That conversation costs you nothing.
Evidence
Measured, not asserted
Every number on this site traces to something real, and where a figure came from someone else’s reporting we say so rather than claiming it.
A note on confidentiality
The client work described on this site is presented in outcome terms only. Organisations, individuals, internal systems and commercially sensitive detail are not identified, and no client material is published here.
That is deliberate, and it is also what you should expect for your own work. If we build something for you, it does not appear on this site in any recognisable form unless you have asked us to put it there.
Start here
Tell us what’s taking too long.
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether there’s something worth building. If there isn’t, we’ll say so.