Computer Expert Uk was founded in 2007 by Martin Hammer who wanted to make a real difference in the world of small businesses.

A word from the founder

After leaving university and working as an analyst programmer for 4 years, and then as a “resident IT expert” for a small company, I soon realised what a difference I could make to a small company. 

Many companies are unaware of what their own computers can actually do for them, also companies that advise you are often biased and want to sell you something, either the latest gadget or the latest flavours of software that is churned out that the makers expect people to keep buying over and over again.

One of the things we offer is advice on how to use what you already have to better use, also to cheaply improve current systems and make better use of human resources as well as IT resources

I have found that in offices everywhere people are wasting their time doing mundane tasks that could be easily automated.

For example:

A company I worked for had quotation forms made from excel documents. These were photocopied and stuck onto packs that were handed around the factory telling people what to do for each order.  Unfortunately no records were kept so that when the MD wanted to know what quotations he gave to any particular company, the staff in the office had to go through boxes manually looking for them.  All the documentation they used for all their orders involved manually filling in photocopied forms.

To address this I installed a cheap windows server running windows server 2003, set up an SQL server database where the staff could type in the relevant details into a VB.net front end. These forms could then be created using VBA macros using the original quotation forms to recreate the original manual system exactly.

The staff could now amend forms on the computer and print them out professionally, with no more manually writing on anything.  Now if they want to know what quotations were given to a customer they could just use part of the name to access all the relevant quotations on the computer. 

I also set up a process to load all the existing quotations (From spreadsheets that were in a very variable format) onto the Sql server database automatically so that no keying of any data was needed.

This gives you some sort of idea of the things I have done in the past.  

I have also worked for a large multi national company where along with a team of four Analyst programmers, we wrote and maintained ALL the systems of the company. (The Company was Transworld Publishers LTD). The yearly cost of employing this team was more than £250,000 pa; this was for only 5 people in total. From this you can see that the sort of expertize you get from us would normally be the type of service only very large companies can afford, however through us you get this sort of expertise at extremely reasonable rates, thus allowing you to achieve an edge over your competition.

I have always been interested in PC’s and Networking and have always prided myself on being able to make something happen that no one has ever done before, and succeeding where other people have failed. 

A small example of this was a system I designed for Transworld Publishers:

We had a PC we used to process returns the original system worked as follows:

1.                  ISBN’s were just scanned and were stored in a single file

2.                  Every day one of us had to go and get a disk and collect this file for storage purposes*

* Predecessors had failed to automate this system. 

When I arrived, I set up dos drivers for the network and installed a router in a local office then ran a cable to the computer.

I then wrote software that would automatically connect to the server and copy the data onto it.  This data was then processed by utilities I designed and wrote for this task.  I also put a system in place to update a returns database (Which I also designed and created).

Now I employ a small team of professionals that are like me, experts in their field. We work together to provide affordable services for the small business sector

Finally our company motto is: “Nothing is impossible, it's just a matter of effort and time”