Software Rescue · Production turnaround
A failed build, rescued — and handed back.
DECO had paid for a build that never reached reliable production. We took it over, stood up a real production environment, engineered out the lag, and handed full ownership back, with no lock-in.
DECO Windshield Repair
Auto glass · repair & replacement
Sector
Auto glass · windshield repair & replacement
Engagement
Rescue → stabilize → handover
Engagement
16 months
scope
Production environment, hardening, knowledge transfer
Team
Nexxt Ideas + DECO
Stack
Rebuilt production infra · CI/CD · observability
Lock-in
None. DECO owns and runs it
Headline outcome
Failed delivery → owned platform
The client
A year in, and nothing they could trust.
— Operations Lead, DECO
“We’d spent a year and had nothing we could put in front of customers with confidence.”
DECO had invested in custom software to run their windshield repair and replacement operation. What they had to show for it was a build that never reached dependable production. It was slow, fragile, and impossible to operate without the original vendor.
They didn’t need a rewrite pitch. They needed someone to make it real, make it reliable, and then make it theirs.
The challenge
A stalled build, and a trust problem.
01
No reliable production
The system worked in a demo and fell over in the real world. There was no environment the team could depend on.
02
Latency and downtime
When it did run, it was slow and prone to outages, and customers felt every one of them.
03
Locked in
DECO couldn’t operate or change the system without the original vendor. They owned the bill, not the software.
— Operations Lead, DECO
“The goal was never to depend on the next vendor either. We wanted to own it.”
The approach
Stabilize first. Hand back the keys last.
We resisted the urge to rewrite the entire system. Instead, we replaced what was most critical and failing. The job was to make the existing investment real and reliable, then transfer everything over to DECO so they could run it without us.
01
Triage the inheritance
Map what works, what’s load-bearing, and what’s quietly dangerous.
02
Stand up real production
A proper environment with repeatable, automated deploys.
03
Harden & observe
Monitoring, alerting, and the guardrails that keep production up.
04
Cut the latency
Profile the slow paths and engineer the lag out.
05
Document everything
Runbooks and architecture written for DECO’s team, not ours.
06
Hand back the keys
Knowledge transfer to full ownership — no lock-in, by design.
Decisions that made it theirs to keep.
Gating
Stabilize before features
No new features until production was trustworthy. Reliability was the feature DECO actually needed.
Sequence
Own-able by design
Every choice optimized for a team that isn’t us running it next year.
Trust
Observability first
You can’t operate what you can’t see so monitoring and alerting came before polish.
Authority
No lock-in
Their infrastructure, their accounts, their keys, their documentation. We built ourselves out of the critical path.
The solution
A production platform DECO runs themselves.
Self-hosted, AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, with seven-year audit retention.
01 · The production platform
Reliable, observable, , and owned.
02 · Observability
See it before customers do
03 · Delivery pipeline
Change without fear
04 · Handover & docs
No lock-in, for real
The results
From unusable to owned.
Metric
Before
After
Change
Metric
Production uptime
Before
unreliable
After
99.9%
Change
stable
Metric
P95 latency
Before
baseline
After
−60%
Change
faster
Metric
Deploy time
Before
manual · days
After
minutes
Change
automated
Metric
Incidents / month
Before
frequent
After
rare
Change
down
Metric
Operational ownership
Before
vendor-locked
After
DECO-owned
Change
transferred
Metric
Runbooks & docs
Before
none
After
complete
Change
new
DECO’s team now ships changes themselves, in minutes, without calling anyone.
The platform runs at 99.9% uptime with the latency that used to frustrate customers engineered out.
When something does go wrong, monitoring catches it first — not the customer on the phone.
There is no lock-in: DECO owns the infrastructure, the code, and the knowledge to run it.
Key insights
What the engagement taught us.
Rescue beats rewrite.
The investment wasn’t worthless — it was unfinished. Making it real was faster and cheaper than starting over, and it respected what DECO had already paid for.
Reliability is a feature.
Customers never asked for new functionality. They asked for software that worked, every time. That was the whole roadmap.
Observability comes first.
A team can only own what it can see. Dashboards and alerts were the difference between operating the system and fearing it.
Design for the
handover from day one.
handover from day one.
“No lock-in” isn’t a closing promise. It’s an architecture decision you make at the start.
This is our impact
We took a failed build and handed back a system DECO owns.
DECO came to us with a stalled, broken delivery. We stood up a real production environment, hardened the infrastructure, engineered the lag out of their operations, and transferred everything back so their own team runs it, with no lock-in.
Back in the driver’s seat
DECO operates the platform in-house — no dependency on us or anyone else.
Reliable and fast
A stable production environment with the downtime and latency engineered out.
Confidence restored
