First Resource Management Group Inc. is a resource management company that provides sustainable forest management services on behalf of forest tenure holders for sustainable benefits and use. FRMG provides forest management services for industry and government on over 9 million hectares of public forests in Ontario, Canada.

The client had a document with hundreds of pages describing what they needed from their industry perspective. The system required a lot of mathematical calculations for the generations of reports. This contact happened back in 2014. The second contact happened in 2019 after the system was operating for five successful years. The client wanted to change the domain and update the servers with the latest PHP version (still running at 5.4 after five years in production).

I decided in 2014 for the first version of the solution to use Zend 2 & MySQL, which was a very popular stack at the time and cheap in matters of development and maintenance. After presenting the costs, I wrote the entire code and used a staging environment to weekly align the expectations during the six months of intensive development. The solution was a success and kept running without any interaction for more than five years until the client needed to correct one small thing in one of the reports. This need triggered some investment to update the stack to the latest PHP version and move the AWS solution. Once I did the small fix, cloud migration, containerization, and PHP update, the system continues to run and hopefully will operate for another five years.

Choosing the right stack for this project results in a client who can focus on his business without interrupting or spending money with the tool they acquire. These five years represented an essential return of investment for a small to medium-sized business. Getting close to the client and understanding its problem helped deliver the solution that perfectly fitted their need.