After working with SouthWare for more than 20 years, we are still finding new ways to help system users deal with tasks that are not part of their routine. The first video I have posted to our YouTube channel illustrates some of the SouthWare tools and techniques we like to use. This first video is silent, but is captioned to explain what is happening. You may want to watch it full screen so that you can see everything clearly.
The principal I like to follow is that the person in the chair should be monitoring, analyzing and deciding, but once they decide, SouthWare should empower them to implement the decision quickly and efficiently.
Observation: too often it seems like the roles of computer and person are reversed – the system decides whether and how to deal with unusual events, but the user is left to deal with the consequences. Example: recently I attempted to correct an error with our health insurance. Once upon a time, the birth of a grandchild led to a child “Baby J” being added as a dependent on our insurance. (my son having the same insurer as I did at the time, and using the same hospital we use). We thought we had corrected the matter, and Baby J no longer appears on our health insurance cards. Yet we started getting notifications to schedule Baby J for immunizations and other preventative care.
Upon contacting our insurer we learned that Baby J was not deleted from whatever database the insurer is using to generate these notices. Yet the only way the customer service representative could look up the record was by date of birth. (I was completely gobsmacked just by this limitation!) Since Baby J never existed, there is no date of birth. The representative effectively just shrugged her shoulders and said there is nothing to do except ignore all the mail we are going to get about Baby J’s health. They didn’t have anyone to refer this issue to or any way to escalate the issue. In this case, the system failed. The user had to spend time talking to us, but has no way to handle this not-routine issue, and there will be a continual expense for all the notices that are going to be mailed regarding a non-existent person.
One objective in deploying an ERP system should be to avoid creating a rigid system. Instead, troubleshooters should have the means within their system to handle mistakes and exceptions as they occur, and also to have a system flexible enough that when surprises arise, the system can be adjusted as needed to resolve them.
Your comments and suggestions are welcome – what unusual situations have you encountered? How did you deal with the situation, and would you have preferred to handle it another way?
Quite often I have found it necessary to move data and applications around without necessarily having fast convenient infrastructure to do it. Worst case was early in my IT career – upgrading a client in the Rio Grande valley on a Unix server without a CD-ROM drive. Imagine a hundred 3.5″ floppy disks, neatly arrayed in two boxes, and a man hunched over a server in dimly lit room, swapping out one disk after the other, for hours….
That’s why I put these two links together in the same post:
7-zip archives end in “7z” instead of “zip”. These 7z files, and the open source app that creates them, are efficient and effective – smaller and faster than zip files, plus the ability to read and extract from zip files. Highly recommended.
I like teracopy because I have found that once I have created a 7z archive – teracopy moves it much more rapidly than Windows does.
Together these two applications can turn an hour long task into a 5 minute task. Just try moving a directory with a couple of gigs of documents and data using Windows explorer, then install 7-zip and Teracopy and create a 7z archive of the same directory and move it using Teracopy. At least twice as fast, and the bigger the directory, the bigger the difference in efficiency.
KIT might stand for “Kept Information Technology” or as a kit in a soldier’s kit – the stuff he takes in the field and keeps handy all the time.
Given that this blog is intended to benefit my clients, associates and friends, it occurred to me that this would be a useful place to record all the little utilities and tools that I have found especially useful. For me, “especially useful” means it’s something I have used more than once or twice, and have referred it to my staff or friends as appropriate.
Accordingly, I am creating a category: “Rob’s KIT” where I will post information and links about all the things useful enough that I have used and reused them later in different circumstances. Something I only used once and forgot about doesn’t make this cut.
This is a restatement of my answer to a related question on LinkedIn.
The issue raised was whether a separate sales manager is necessary for a growing business. My reply was that this was a second stage question.
The first stage question is whether your sales staff is equipped to sell successfully – which really is a summation of several questions:
Are there clear metrics of the activity of your sales staff, and are they being regularly tracked and measured, and reviewed?
Are there marketing efforts designed to fill the pipeline with prospects, and are these efforts measured and updated?
Is your sales staff trained and knowledgeable in your products and services?
Is there a defined process for your sales staff to generate and deliver quotes and to turn quotes into orders?
Is the sales commission/incentive structure designed to encourage the behavior you desire and does the sales staff understand how it operates? If all of that is in place, then you may not need a separate sales manager.
Knowing which parts of the above are lacking tells you what to look for if you decide to need to add someone to manage your sales staff, or if you need to adjust responsibilities within the staff you already have.
We have automated voice mail that came with our new digital phone system, but we choose not to use it.
From 8 am to 5 pm every day, if you call us, someone is supposed to pick up the phone and talk to you. Generally, we ask to put someone on hold, pick up the other line and take a note or promise a callback, and the return to the first caller. This doesn’t always happen, on a few occasions, we get more calls coming in simultaneously than we can handle, in which case we may not get to you before you give up. We apologize, we do not mean to do this, and we try not to let it happen.
Confession: one year we were especially bad at getting all the calls. This was because somehow our 800 number was published in Canada as a tax-assistance hotline. Quite a few folks in Ontario and Saskatoon needing help with their taxes were confused when we told them they had reached a software company in San Antonio, Texas.
This is a philosophical choice for us. We have email, of course, and high speed internet and web conferencing and much of the other paraphernalia you would expect of an IT company, but we have rejected voice mail because it is mostly annoying to us. If it’s annoying to us, we figure it’s probably annoying to you as well, so why inflict it on you?
More and more frequently it is used as a shield to keep customers from reaching their vendor, hoping the frustration level will defeat complaints without further effort or expenditure. As a business owner, I understand the temptation to do that, but still we choose a different way.
We would rather not try to hide from complaints. We want to hear from you, good or bad.
If it’s worth your effort to call, it’s worth our effort to listen.
I realize that the Boring Accounting Software Manifesto invites criticism by folks who say: “hey, our accounting software is exciting, it does this and this and this. It’s not BORING.”
Ok, you are excited about it. Good for you. You may even excite me about your accounting software.
But accounting software is compelling and impressive to me because that’s what I do. Techies get excited about tech stuff. Plumbers get excited about plumbing stuff. Restaurant suppliers get excited about new foods. Lawyers get excited about legal stuff. Lingerie distributors get excited about lingerie… well maybe techies get excited about lingerie, too. But that doesn’t work the other way around.
Most of my clients, when I have done a good job, don’t really think about me very much. Some of them even have trouble remembering my name or Flexware (although sometimes they call the software we resell Flexware) even though they may spend lots of money on us year in and year out. Why? Because it’s working, it’s doing what they want it to do. When they want it to do something else, sometimes they have to dig up our phone number or email address.
I offer “lunchbreaks” little web conferences about our product and new features to see if I can stir up some interest or remind folks of something they may want to do with the product. This is an effort to stay visible and memorable.
But the challenge, year in and year out, is to deliver. Excitement is easy to find. Value, not so much.
I would rather be boring and valuable than exciting any day of the week.
Once upon a time, as a newbie business owner, a marketing friend told me I needed an elevator speech, a 30-second explanation of what Flexware is and what we do.
I really wanted to give an interesting explanation, something to hold someone’s attention and get them to ask for more. Yet I realized that the simple explanation of what I do, install accounting software, should not be interesting.
When you look up “interesting” in a thesaurus, you get positive sounding words and a positive connotation. You get words like: absorbing, compelling, impressive, and provocative.
People don’t typically associate those words with a business software project experience. More often the appropriate words fall into the “maddening” category: aggravating, annoying, exasperating, frustrating, infuriating, provoking, riling, troubling, trying and vexatious. When things in my industry get “interesting,” it’s interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
What customers really want out of business software is unmemorable, routine, unexciting, ho-hum.
In one word, boring.
I realized I had a great elevator speech ‚ I install boring accounting software.
Well, more accurately, I try to. As far as I am aware, only one piece of software enjoys universal acceptance, does precisely what it is supposed to, and never crashes a system, and that’s the solitaire card program that has been installed on PCs since at least Windows 3.0 ‚ which is where I first encountered it.
But my vision is to make software projects productive, rewarding, valuable and make the software itself boring.
With that in mind, here is the Boring Accounting Software manifesto.
At its ideal, Boring Accounting Software should be:
Like the perfect waiter in the restaurant: charming, polite, super efficient, and always serving up exactly what we need when we need it.
Like the cop on the beat: honest, attentive to detail, discrete when appropriate but alert to potential problems.
Like the handyman of our dreams: who fixes up the place and slots in improvements when and where I want, does quality work and doesn’t leave a mess behind.
Like the best doctor I ever had: listens attentively, diagnoses the problem correctly, and makes the solution as painless as possible.
(Note: I have no wish to imply folks in these professions are boring. I know people in all of the professions, and I like them very much, but knowing my doctor matters to me only when I am sick, knowing my handyman only matters to me when I need to install something. The rest of my time and thought is NOT devoted to them. If one of them happens to be my friend, I think about them and am interested in them because they are my friend, not because of what they do.)
And here is the criteria I like to use in evaluating the true success of a software project:
Is using the software a more unmemorable, unexciting, routine, ho-hum experience?
Or is it more aggravating, annoying, and infuriating?
And what is the trend as we go along? Are we progressing towards boring or not?
We have to say a special thanks to Ron Loun of www.ievnow.com, client and friend, whose energy and enthusiasm really show in everything he does, including this site!
