Re: What problems are people in the MV world trying to solve

"Tony Gravagno" <address.is.in.posts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:i1ogk45ftjjobte7tlggopi8vpsj970cit@xxxxxxxxxx


Do end-users ever ask you folks about integrating Outlook with their
MV apps - sharing contact and event data between the systems?

It is VERY common to see things like invoices, or purchase confirms
needing to be sent by email. When most of my pick applications were built,
they
were not using email. The fax machine was the de-facto Electronic means used
to transmit stuff.

A good number of my pick applications were actually moved to a windows
environment because of the ease in which things like reports, or invoices
etc can be emailed to an end user. So, when a users in a form (and one of
the fields also contains an e-mail name), they can click on a button to
email the invoice. Now outlook is launched and the invoice is attached as a
pdf file. Note that it's rather important here that there's going to be some
text entered in the e-mail by the end user BEFORE we send this email. Since
most businesses are now using outlook, then it only makes sense that I use
the same interface and the same application that their users are trained
with. So, this likely was one of the larger reasons why some of my
applications left the pick world.

What
about other productivity/organization apps?

Well then of course we are talking about word, and usually excel. If you
look at the post here just the other day the person was asking about how to
move data from a pick system into an excel spread***. Keep in mind there
is two scenarios I've encountered with my clients with regards to using
excel:

Case 1 - They are a longtime pick user, and they are longtime user of
compu-***. Perhaps most amazing of Compu *** was the ability that a
particular cell could be resolved to a particular pick item (in other words
a cell could look up the value directly from the database). When you move
over to excel, this practical feature will be sorely missed by the customer.

When I was hired to move the spreadsheets into excel, I simply wrote a
custom VBA function that allowed me to do exactly the same thing I could in
compu-***. I don't have the function in front of me, and it's been a
couple years since I looked at it, but the function was something along the
lines like:

mylookup("pick table name","item id", amc, vmc)

Of course the above 3 parms could actually be any cell from the current
Excel spread***. So, this worked wonderful, and instantly gave the
customer much the same functionality we had when we're using Compu-***.
Note that I did not use a SQL + odbc driver to pick, but used the d3 class
object that comes with the odbc system. This worked well in my case.
I've been considering posts this code on my web site as it
works very well.

Case 2 - they are a long time pick user, and they are a longtime user of the
jet word processor. Once again, users will demand word. Hence, we have to
replace all these merge and jet templates with ms-word. Once again I wrote a
really nice set of windows script routines that could be fired off from the
pick side. We were using via-dict, and it could simply "send" the one record
on the screen you looking at, and then launch a word merge based on that one
record by executing a windows scrip. The end result they would choose an
option on the pick green screen, and word would be launched with the data
merged into a template (the user was required to further edit the text in
the template).

The above issues (email, word, excel) are the most common scenarios I've
encountered for what existing pick customers need.

However, there is a new growing trend which is REALLY huge, and that is
without question is web enabling portions of these applications. Notice how
I said **portions** of these applications. I cannot stress "portions" word
harder here.

There is supposed to be a recession right now, but I have clients just
piling up and lined up because they need part of their applications to be
web enabled. In fact, web enabling your software is one of the last *BIG*
frontiers of our computing industry for smaller businesses. Over the years
many reasons for upgrades have created opportunity for us developers. I gave
the example such as users now demanding a graphical interface for using word
or excel in place of text based jet or compu-***.

Now, almost every one of my clients can use some web enabling
of their software. Take for example my tour operator package. When I tell
the client that you get 20 calls a day, and each call represents 5 minutes
of time, that is 100 minutes of employee time. If you web enabled that,
that's 100 minutes of labor saved IN ONE DAY!!! Often this will
save the business even more money and time since other are not put on
hold.

In other words, the web part is big, it's huge, and represents one of the
biggest labor saving tools that most businesses can introduce. In fact web
enabling some portions of your application will result in MORE labor saving
than the original adoption of computers and software in the first place!


I believe in just Canada alone Purolator said they save $10 million a year
by web enabled their package tracking system. Thus you don't have phone up a
person (and they don't need a roomful of operators to field calls for those
package tracking, you simply self service off on the web now).

So then the question becomes what business tools and processes are you
developing software with now, and WILL those tools allow you to build that
bridge to the web? For me right now that bridge has become SharePoint. I
will not get into SharePoint in this post, but you did ask for scenarios and
what businesses are now looking for, and what will they pay me real money
for.

In place of the person booking an event or tour, they simply do it on the
web (I don't have the web parts for my software built of yet, but I'm moving
down the road as fast as possible). Furthermore in many cases a lot of my
tour or event management software system has to deal with a group of people.
That means we need a facebook type of system in which that group of 30
people can organize an event. If we provide a web interface, not only can
they build the event, but the data entry for those 30 people's names and
addresses etc can now be done by the customer. And we can electronically
take their payments.

There's also the simple case where ONE customer needs to look up an account
balance or when they last paid their bill, or simply how much they owe you
This just doesn't apply to my tour management systems, this
applies to every company on the planet that has an accounting system in
house. In most cases you have someone in the accounting department sitting
at a terminal fielding calls from customers all day long answering silly
questions about an account balance. If you web enabled this payment portion
of your application, then customer can simply self serve this information
themselves. So, we are not talking about web enabling the *whole*
application
but only the **part** that allows customers to self serve information that
they
need.

I know many a people that don't their banking on line, but I know
tremendous amount of people who will go on-line to check their credit card
or account balances (even for their business).

Once again the amount of phone time this can save a client is absolutely
enormous. In many cases they can eliminate a fulltime position that fields
these calls by web enabling their applications.

Once again when the business see the above kind of about savings they can
realize by web enabling these applications, they 9 out of 10 times say to
me, WHEN CAN WE HAVE THIS feature!!. And want to give me money on the spot.

For the larger businesses, they already spent absolute truckloads of money
to web enable some of their applications (to handle their customer service
needs). For the smaller businesses this represents too large of an
investment, until now or very recently.

Again ***until now***.

With the advent of new web tools and the lowering of costs of web enabling
our software systems and the introduction of cloud computing, then all the
pieces have finally come together to create an enormous opportunity in our
IT industry. Now smaller organizations can afford to build the systems.

So between the office automation with outlook etc, the next big frontier
is that demand by EVERY one of my customers is they want parts of my
applications pushed out to the web so that customers can self serve their
information.


--
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
pleaseNOOSpamKallal@xxxxxxx




.

Loading