After a full year of effort, collaboration, and iteration – our new operations management system at TTG Imaging Solutions is live. And now, it has a name:
OTIS – short for Operations, Ticketing, and Inventory System – was chosen by popular vote across the company, and it couldn’t be a more fitting name for what we’ve built.
The Why Behind the Rebuild
When I joined TTG, the company was operating on ServiceMax, a SaaS product built on Salesforce. While powerful, it wasn’t flexible enough to support the incredibly complex workflows of a company like TTG – a growing organization formed by 13 legacy companies, each with its own products, service models, and pricing structures.
ServiceMax had guardrails that simply didn’t bend far enough. As a result, the workflows were being forced to fit the tool – not the other way around.
We needed something customizable, lightweight, and capable of integrating across our stack. So we went back to our roots – FileMaker.
The Plan: Customize, Modernize, Integrate
TTG’s legacy FileMaker instance had been collecting dust, but it still offered exactly what we needed: total workflow control and an open structure that could integrate with our ERP (Sage) and scale with our needs.
We partnered with Soliant Consulting and leaned heavily on Wynn Myers, our internal FileMaker developer, to bring the platform back to life.
Here’s how we ran the project:
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Step 1: Documented every operational workflow across all departments – I spent the year visiting teams around the country to do it right.
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Step 2: Built a cross-functional team from departments across the org, meeting weekly to surface needs, test changes, and drive alignment.
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Step 3: Ran the dev process in two-week Agile sprints, writing user stories from live feedback and refining the UI for each function.
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Step 4: Created a one-way integration to Sage – FileMaker now drives all service tickets and inventory, which sync over to Sage for billing and financial reporting.
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Step 5: Conducted deep testing with real users, fixed what didn’t work, and delayed go-live by one week when our FSE team flagged readiness issues.
That final call – to delay by one week – showed the maturity of the organization. The executive team wasn’t thrilled, but we made the right call. It’s more important to launch well than to launch fast. And I was proud of the team for raising their hands when it mattered.
Launch & Success
We officially went live on May 13th, 2024.
Yes, there were bugs. There always are. But the dev team was on standby and responded immediately. We squashed issues quickly, and by June we were already seeing strong adoption, streamlined workflows, and better operational visibility across the business.
OTIS is now the backbone of TTG’s operations – helping our field service engineers, warehouse teams, and customer service teams stay in sync, act faster, and make better decisions.
Let the People Name It
In July, we held a company-wide naming contest. Hundreds of submissions rolled in, followed by a company-wide vote. The winner? OTIS – and the employee who submitted it earned a well-deserved $500 prize and bragging rights across the org.
It’s a fun name, but it represents something serious: a modernized, unified operations system that TTG can build on for years to come.
What’s Next?
With Phase 1 complete, we’re already thinking about what Phase 2 will bring. We’ll be adding more advanced reporting, expanding mobile access, and continuing to improve the platform based on direct feedback from the people who use it every day.
To everyone who helped – from Wynn, Soliant, our cross-functional working group, to every department that answered questions and pushed for better outcomes – thank you. This wasn’t just a product launch. It was a cultural shift.
OTIS is live – and it’s working.
– Vince