If your activities involve .....

v Traceability
for example: information and record keeping for quality assurance and quality control purposes, HACCP, GMP procedures, product tracking, certification, fair trade ...

v Monitoring and Evaluation
for example: assessing agricultural improvements, farmers and community group activities; monitoring people's assets and changes in livelihoods of the poor; socio-economic performances ...

v Documentation
for example: publishing project and research outputs; producing informational guides on CD-ROM, multi-media training materials, business information ...

...... then we may be able to help your organisation to improve the way information is managed and utilised.

STEP Systems create database-driven solutions for managing information which are flexible, adaptable and straightforward to use, and yet do not necessarily require any knowledge of databases or computer programming. Information can be packaged and published locally to meet the requirements of businesses, organisations, service providers, ngos, training and similar enterprises, particularly in developing countries.

The innovative solutions developed by Step Systems make use of information mapping techniques. This provides a pictorial method to ‘lay out and visualise’ informational requirements for any particular project. Customised programming then transforms these maps into highly, searchable database solutions.

We make use of dynamic, relational database technologies using metadata and which are web-based. This means we can provide solutions to quite complex information management requirements quickly and effectively. The web provides the means for transferring data so information can be viewed at remote locations or even data entered at different locations into a central database system.

Access and security measures means that data can be controlled and locked so that crucially ..... who can see what, who can edit, who can change what and who can use what ...... can be set through different data management supervisory systems.

We usually supply solutions which allow clients to input, manage and output their own data. We can also provide solutions with data already entered. We work collaboratively with you to customise systems to your meet needs. We achieve this through a family of tools so we can provide different answers to different needs for different kinds of users:

v Step Editor - for inputting digital data and indexing the data through metadata

v Step Viewer - for viewing, searching and retrieving data

v Step Publisher - for outputting data to file, print, CD or other type of output.

Solutions can be simple minor extensions of our off-the-shelf Step Viewer and Step Publisher ... or can be bespoke database and web-based applications to meet your needs. Step systems are all royalty free and do not require investment in expensive licences for databases, reporting engines and other components. This is achieved by using high quality 'open source' and 'licence free' components throughout, making our solutions low in cost to deploy.

Step solutions use award winning database and report-engine components including Elevate Software (www.elevatesoft.com) and Fast Reports (www.fast-report.com) to give top class performance.

For more information, view:

Guides ... to see sample products we have produced and to view sample screen shots

Solutions ... to find out more about various database solutions we have supplied

Steps ... to understand the steps we take to create solutions

About us ... to learn more about Step Systems and the people involved

Contact us ... to contact us should you require more information about how we can help you

Shop ... to order a copy on-line of our 'About Foods in Africa' CD-ROM.