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Thursday, May 04, 2006
Over the last 2 years or so, I have been far more excited by the programming side of my business than the sell/modify/service/support side. It's not that there were not great improvements in the products available - some of which are exciting. A number of things have come together over the past few years that have made it possible for me as a programmer to unleash the hidden potential in my clients' data stores. To name just a few:
But the real winner is the business owner. The opportunity of creating and occupying a new niche has never been so easy or universal. And the opportunity to use data to your competitive advantage is limited only to the boundries of one's imagination.
Having said that, I would like to present a list of projects that should help to expand your view of this universe. Some of these I have executed for clients, some I have executed for myself, some are amalgamations of ideas & techniques I have developed, and all are within my capability to deliver. I break them out into three main areas: 1/ Web Development, 2/ Desktop Development, and 3/ Automation:
1/ WEB DEVELOPMENT:
Build or Redesign your Web Site: A web site should be easy to navigate from any page. It should clearly from the first (home) page lead the visitor to the services or product you provide. If you are providing a service it should have a privacy policy and a disclaimer. It should facilitate communication with your customers. Your company's contact information should be easy t0 find. Page layout should be consistent.
Add an Online Store: You do not have to go to a lot of expense to have a shopping cart or to accept credit cards. Services such as PayPal will shoulder that burden for you. TaskMan has experience interfacing with the PayPal back end, allowing you to devote your development budget to creating a first class front end for your business.
Online Customer Service: We can assist you in creating a first class customer service portal, combining online self-service with automated routing for requests that need staff assistance. Track requests and disposition on a per-case basis. Spend less time on the phone and speed resolution of customer issues.
Online Document Center: Give your customers and sales representatives the documents they need, on-demand. Create a central repository for critical business documents. Gain the ability to print, fax or e-mail these documents from anywhere.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management. Keep track of your customers, sales reps, products, orders, invoices, sales pipeline, calendars, etc. We have both open source and custom solutions available. And - best of all - we can interface with most accounting & inventory systems.
Handheld Order Entry: Using the EVDO high-speed Internet access provided by Sprint and Verizon, we now have the capability of providing use-almost-anywhere mobile phone applications. We are no longer limited to Hot Spots or Wireless LAN range. The new Windows Mobile 5.0 gives us the capability of programming the device itself, and gives your users a familiar Windows interface - cutting down on necessary training & support. In addition, web pages may be miniaturized, so that those applications may be accessible from mobile phone devices, PDAs, and the conventional desktop (Windows, Linux, Apple and any other operating system with a reasonable standard browser).
Handheld Warehouse Inventory: Similarly, EVDO mobile phone coverage frees us from the constraints of a wireless LAN in the warehouse. If you would like to count inventory or provide lookup capabilities in your warehouse, Pocket PCs, PDAs & Ultra-Mobile PCs are made to order. They are inexpensive (as little as $295 per device) and the airtime is nominal (Sprint charges $15 on top of their regular phone bill for unlimited EVDO Internet access). If you need printers or barcode scanners, you would need to look at a more expensive solution, of course.
A Web-based Product Catalog: These may be maintained either with or without pricing information, on your web server or through services such as Google's Froogle (more on that in the automation section below). If you want the world to beat a path to your door, you should be doing everything you can to publicize what you have inside.
Corporate Blog: You are reading a blog right now - and the great news is how easy it is to create your own! This blog is currently published through Google's Blogger service, which is free. We have it publish to our own server, but you don't even need a web server - you can use Google's real estate at no charge.
Corporate Knowledgebase: We can help you setup a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section on your web site, or you can take it to the next level with a full-on Knowledgebase. Intellectual capital is one of the most important assets a business can possess, and a good Knowledgebase is a great way of preserving & disseminating this Intellectual Property. This may be deployed on an internal (corporate) or an external (web) server, with either public or limited login access. Specific areas may even be restricted to specific groups within your company or customers/vendors.
2/ DESKTOP APPLICATIONS:
Fax Daemon: An application that runs in the background waiting for documents to arrive in a specific folder, for purposes of faxing. We will set you up with PDF print drivers that will allow you to "print to disk" for this purpose. File naming conventions may be used to specify customer, or a fax number may be embedded in the file name.
Internal Communications: Think of this as a sort of internal corporate IM (Internet Messenger). Alert specific users, groups, or all users globally to specific events and announcements that "pop up" on your employees' screens. Send meeting announcements. Tell the sales staff to push the left-handed smoke shifters today. Tell everyone to exit the accounting system for maintenance.
Product Catalog: Automatically generate product catalogs for your customers directly from your accounting system on demand. These may reflect customer specific or tiered pricing. We can build in filters and groupings as needed.
Export to Spreadsheet: This has been one of our most popular enhancements: custom exports of specific data - sorted, filtered, totalled, grouped - as needed. If you are doing the same labor-intensive spreadsheet analyses over and over again - or if you feel this sort of analysis is beyond your reach - this is the automation you need. Let us do the hard part - so you can spend your time refining & analyzing the result.
Trend Charts: Generate Trend Charts from your accounting system. Track sales, costs, profit, inventory onhand, or other indicators within your system.
3/ AUTOMATION:
Daily Inventory Levels: Let us write an application that will output inventory information on a daily basis to the destination of your choice: a spreadsheet, an e-mail, a fax, a disk file, a printer or a viewer. You tell us what you need: on hand? on order? in transit? allocated? work in progress? etc.
Orders Entered: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes copies or lists to your customers and/or sales representatives. Set to run at midnight or any other convenient time.
Shipment Notifications: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes copies or lists to your customers and/or sales representatives. Set to run at midnight or any other convenient time.
Invoices: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes copies or statements to your customers and/or sales representatives. Set to run at midnight or any other convenient time.
Daily Managerial Indicators: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes a print-out of important numbers from your accounting system to one or more managers.
Daily Online Posting of Items for Sale: Automatically post items (and prices and stock levels if desired) on your own web server or through services such as Google's Froogle. We can setup filters to limit which items are posted online.
CAVEATS:
- The universal connectivity provided by the Internet
- The evolution of the graphical user interface
- The interoperability of programming languages and operating systems
- The advanced programming tools available
- The increasing sophistication of the user base
- The emergence of Web Services
But the real winner is the business owner. The opportunity of creating and occupying a new niche has never been so easy or universal. And the opportunity to use data to your competitive advantage is limited only to the boundries of one's imagination.
Having said that, I would like to present a list of projects that should help to expand your view of this universe. Some of these I have executed for clients, some I have executed for myself, some are amalgamations of ideas & techniques I have developed, and all are within my capability to deliver. I break them out into three main areas: 1/ Web Development, 2/ Desktop Development, and 3/ Automation:
1/ WEB DEVELOPMENT:
Build or Redesign your Web Site: A web site should be easy to navigate from any page. It should clearly from the first (home) page lead the visitor to the services or product you provide. If you are providing a service it should have a privacy policy and a disclaimer. It should facilitate communication with your customers. Your company's contact information should be easy t0 find. Page layout should be consistent.
Add an Online Store: You do not have to go to a lot of expense to have a shopping cart or to accept credit cards. Services such as PayPal will shoulder that burden for you. TaskMan has experience interfacing with the PayPal back end, allowing you to devote your development budget to creating a first class front end for your business.
Online Customer Service: We can assist you in creating a first class customer service portal, combining online self-service with automated routing for requests that need staff assistance. Track requests and disposition on a per-case basis. Spend less time on the phone and speed resolution of customer issues.
Online Document Center: Give your customers and sales representatives the documents they need, on-demand. Create a central repository for critical business documents. Gain the ability to print, fax or e-mail these documents from anywhere.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management. Keep track of your customers, sales reps, products, orders, invoices, sales pipeline, calendars, etc. We have both open source and custom solutions available. And - best of all - we can interface with most accounting & inventory systems.
Handheld Order Entry: Using the EVDO high-speed Internet access provided by Sprint and Verizon, we now have the capability of providing use-almost-anywhere mobile phone applications. We are no longer limited to Hot Spots or Wireless LAN range. The new Windows Mobile 5.0 gives us the capability of programming the device itself, and gives your users a familiar Windows interface - cutting down on necessary training & support. In addition, web pages may be miniaturized, so that those applications may be accessible from mobile phone devices, PDAs, and the conventional desktop (Windows, Linux, Apple and any other operating system with a reasonable standard browser).
Handheld Warehouse Inventory: Similarly, EVDO mobile phone coverage frees us from the constraints of a wireless LAN in the warehouse. If you would like to count inventory or provide lookup capabilities in your warehouse, Pocket PCs, PDAs & Ultra-Mobile PCs are made to order. They are inexpensive (as little as $295 per device) and the airtime is nominal (Sprint charges $15 on top of their regular phone bill for unlimited EVDO Internet access). If you need printers or barcode scanners, you would need to look at a more expensive solution, of course.
A Web-based Product Catalog: These may be maintained either with or without pricing information, on your web server or through services such as Google's Froogle (more on that in the automation section below). If you want the world to beat a path to your door, you should be doing everything you can to publicize what you have inside.
Corporate Blog: You are reading a blog right now - and the great news is how easy it is to create your own! This blog is currently published through Google's Blogger service, which is free. We have it publish to our own server, but you don't even need a web server - you can use Google's real estate at no charge.
Corporate Knowledgebase: We can help you setup a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section on your web site, or you can take it to the next level with a full-on Knowledgebase. Intellectual capital is one of the most important assets a business can possess, and a good Knowledgebase is a great way of preserving & disseminating this Intellectual Property. This may be deployed on an internal (corporate) or an external (web) server, with either public or limited login access. Specific areas may even be restricted to specific groups within your company or customers/vendors.
2/ DESKTOP APPLICATIONS:
Fax Daemon: An application that runs in the background waiting for documents to arrive in a specific folder, for purposes of faxing. We will set you up with PDF print drivers that will allow you to "print to disk" for this purpose. File naming conventions may be used to specify customer, or a fax number may be embedded in the file name.
Internal Communications: Think of this as a sort of internal corporate IM (Internet Messenger). Alert specific users, groups, or all users globally to specific events and announcements that "pop up" on your employees' screens. Send meeting announcements. Tell the sales staff to push the left-handed smoke shifters today. Tell everyone to exit the accounting system for maintenance.
Product Catalog: Automatically generate product catalogs for your customers directly from your accounting system on demand. These may reflect customer specific or tiered pricing. We can build in filters and groupings as needed.
Export to Spreadsheet: This has been one of our most popular enhancements: custom exports of specific data - sorted, filtered, totalled, grouped - as needed. If you are doing the same labor-intensive spreadsheet analyses over and over again - or if you feel this sort of analysis is beyond your reach - this is the automation you need. Let us do the hard part - so you can spend your time refining & analyzing the result.
Trend Charts: Generate Trend Charts from your accounting system. Track sales, costs, profit, inventory onhand, or other indicators within your system.
3/ AUTOMATION:
Daily Inventory Levels: Let us write an application that will output inventory information on a daily basis to the destination of your choice: a spreadsheet, an e-mail, a fax, a disk file, a printer or a viewer. You tell us what you need: on hand? on order? in transit? allocated? work in progress? etc.
Orders Entered: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes copies or lists to your customers and/or sales representatives. Set to run at midnight or any other convenient time.
Shipment Notifications: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes copies or lists to your customers and/or sales representatives. Set to run at midnight or any other convenient time.
Invoices: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes copies or statements to your customers and/or sales representatives. Set to run at midnight or any other convenient time.
Daily Managerial Indicators: Automated daily routine: E-mails or faxes a print-out of important numbers from your accounting system to one or more managers.
Daily Online Posting of Items for Sale: Automatically post items (and prices and stock levels if desired) on your own web server or through services such as Google's Froogle. We can setup filters to limit which items are posted online.
CAVEATS:
- There is a certain overhead to getting started with new accounts. If you are an existing client, this will be less expensive and less complicated than for new clients. Most of what is said herein is well known by our existing clientele, so this is addressed largely to prospective clients.
- We require a deposit on all development work, and large projects require progress payments. We require final payment on delivery, and limit debugging services to within 30 days after deliver for non-retainer clientele. See our Standard Client Agreement for more information.
- We require high-speed remote access to all stations which you wish for us to service and/or be responsible for. We do not travel unless amply compensated for such.
- A retainer is the best value for any company that uses us more than occasionally. See the TaskMan Rate Schedule for more information.
