Black Lab Solutions
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Case studies

Two engagements, and what they changed.

We publish client stories only with permission, and only where we can say what actually changed — which means this page grows slowly, on purpose.

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Black Lab began as the internal IT operation behind three Texas care companies: Disability Services of the Southwest (DSSW),Lifespan Home Care, and CDS in Texas. DSSW consolidates the group, but each runs a distinct P&L, distinct operations, and distinct compliance obligations — so these are two different engagements, not one. Across all three, the spin-out's first year brought the group's overall IT budget down by~$100K, running 400+ workstations and 40+ servers.

Case 001 — DSSW & Lifespan Home Care

Eleven locations that had to stay connected

The challenge
Two functionally equivalent home care operations running around 150 desks across 11 Texas locations. Care coordination happens in cloud applications, so a site that loses connectivity is a site cloud applications, so a site that loses connectivity is a site that stops working. Nobody centrally knew when that happened until someone phoned it in, and an outage at a small office could runpast four hours before anyone began fixing it. Dual internet was not the answer it looked like: the backup was an inexpensive LTE line, and checking a dashboard is not monitoring. Meanwhile staff did the sensible thing and switched to phone hotspots and public wifi — which moved regulated work onto networks nobody controlled.
What we did
Proactive monitoring across the estate: internet connectivity at every location, SaaS availability so an outage in someone else's platform is identified as theirs rather than debugged as ours, and a VPN rebuilt to be both reliable and secure. We also replaced a legacy document workflow with an automated system that prepares, routes for review, and dispatches regulated records — work that had been manual, repetitive, and easy to get wrong. That is the shape of build we take on: bounded, finished, and measurable — where we draw the line.
The result
Time-to-awareness went from four-plus hours to zero.Both connections at every site are monitored, and an alert reaches the IT team the moment either drops — so by the time a support ticket exists, someone is already working the problem. Most weeks nothing happens and the work disappears into the background, which is the point. No more hotspots, and the records process no longer consumes staff hours or depends on somebody remembering a step.

Case 002 — CDS in Texas

Statewide service from one office, and the platforms it runs on

The challenge
A materially larger operation — the majority of the group's estate — delivering services throughout Texas from a single San Antonio office. Scale like that concentrates risk in software: the platforms the business runs on matter more than the hardware, and a weak one isn't obvious until it fails or is breached.
What we did
The same proactive monitoring, extended with automation scripts for operational work that repeated at volume. Then the part most providers skip: a deeply technical security review of the SaaS platforms already in use and the ones being considered, alongside local IT operations — so platform decisions were made on evidence rather than on a vendor's security page.
The result
Two examples of many. Preparing and sending the recurring state form batch used to occupy a full-time employee; it now runs automatically in under an hour a month. Healthcare employability research consumed two weeks of a team’s time every month and now takes less than a day for one person. The people who did that work moved to the customer relationships it had been crowding out. Alongside that: monitoring that surfaces problems before users report them, and platform choices backed by a technical review that stands up to an auditor.

Naming these three is the exception, not our practice.They are published with written authorization because we ran their IT before Black Lab existed. Client relationships are confidential by default — we describe the work, not the client, and your name would never appear anywhere without you agreeing to it in writing first.

What every Black Lab case study contains

  1. The challenge

    Where the client started — the pain, the risk, and the numbers: hours of downtime, audit findings, ticket backlog.

  2. What we did

    The decisions, in plain English — not a list of product names.

  3. The measurable result

    At least one number a business owner cares about. A result without a number is a testimonial in a costume.

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