The Insanity of Software

At times someone distills perfectly what it means to be a software developer.  This week Peter Welch posted the following article to Gizmodo and I strongly recommend it to my readers “Why a Job in Programming Is Absolute Hell”.  This week, I wanted to comment on this blog and try to let you know that while programming is hell; the trip is worth it if you can help customers try and solve their problems.

Welch’s thesis is that while software development does not require you to lift 50 pounds or dangle from a building while you wield together iron girders, it is filled with stress and insanity.  I can attest in my career that software is one of the few products we make in western civilization which is made completely by hand.  That said many of the people who build software see themselves as artists and craftsmen.  This is a recipe for mental illness and conflict.   Because no two software developers will build the same thing the same way, this means that the more software developers you have working on a project the more disagreements about how the work is going to get done.

I am going to postulate something known as Wisniowski’s theorem.  For every developer on a software team, the amount of disagreement increases by the power of the number of developers on the team.  Thus, a team of seven developers is two to the seventh power more likely to disagree about how to build something than a team of two developers.

To prevent this from spiraling out of control, scrum masters and project managers were created who were supposed to act as guides and leaders to prevent conflict from spiraling out of control and get work done on time.  This has created an entirely different set of problems because many project managers and scrum masters do not come from a technical background.  So they do not know how to mediate conflict in a technical team or even what questions to ask.  This means that developers become insubordinate and work around the project leadership to get work done.  By the time someone has realized what has happened, it is either too late or the developer has decided to switch jobs working someplace else.  If this sounds like madness, it is.

So what company to do?  Well many people purchase software in the hope of never having to figure out how it is constructed.  Others pay millions of dollars for consulting companies to build the software and hope that it works.  Finally, the truly brave hire developers and IT professionals and hope that they can keep the organization afloat.  I have lived it for over 15 years and I have to scars to show it.

This is why I founded E₃ systems.  I wanted to help businesses with low cost and low hassle solutions to fleet maintenance and inventory management.  Contact us today and we will tell you how.

Software development is filled with stress and insanity.  It has rewarded me with a modicum of independence and a middle class lifestyle but I know for a fact that there has to be a better way to practice my profession.  So enjoy that working software because someone had to go a little insane to make it a reality.

Until next time.

Some Perspective about the Twitter IPO

Some thoughts about all the love Twitter is feeling.

The big news this week is the initial public offering of Twitter on the New York Stock exchange.  Every entrepreneur dreams of the moment when their hard work and effort pays off and they are swimming in stock options and cash.  It crosses my mind from time to time.  This week, I want to provide a little perspective to those wild fantasies that IPO’s create.

An IPO or huge success is as American as apple pie.  A person creates a product everyone wants and then receives a huge payday.  What most people do not see are the countless hours perfecting that product.  People do not see the sales calls ending in frustration.  Finally, it is difficult convey the loneliness and solitude it takes to build a good product.  It is always easier to show the big pay day rather than the long slog it took to get to that payday.  I am not looking for a big payday.  I would like to be able to have my own business but living like Tony Stark with my own computer assistant seems a little far-fetched for me.  

It should also be evident that all the frenzy regarding Twitter is more heat than light.  According to the filing with the SEC, Twitter is still struggling to generate advertising revenue. It is one of those products which people use but cannot seem to make money; sounds like a fishy investment to me.  This does not mean that Twitter will not figure it out but currently people look like they are investing in the promise of profits rather than actual profits.

This situation reminds me of the good-old days of the Dot.com bubble where any company with .com in its name created a gold rush on the stock market.  Companies with spurious business models and the ability to burn through cash lit up the stock market.  What these companies were, according to Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, were falling watermelons where everyone made money until they hit the pavement.  Those forced to clean up the mess were individual investors.  It was a giddy and stupid time.  I am glad I lived through it because it flavored my approach to business for the better.  I still keep a Pets.com sock puppet to remind me of that era’s excess.

I got into business not for the wealth and fame but because I want to work for myself.  I want to help other business people make money and put people to work.  We think that our new Tony fleet management software is a great tool to provide risk management and regulatory compliance to small business.  We also think Sully 2.0 is the right tool to help your business manage inventory and bills of lading.  Contact us today and we will show you.

I am very happy for the owners and investors in Twitter’s IPO but I won’t be toasting them any time soon.  I will save that for my own big milestone when I can go professional.

Until next time.

Our Direction.

Hard work and we are ready to help you rock your business

We are currently in the middle of an upgrade and finishing up a major release which we are going to unveil next week.  I am pretty proud of the direction we are heading.  This week’s blog post we talk about some of those changes.

I founded this company because I wanted to provide tools for small and medium sized businesses to help them run their businesses for effectively. This meant web based systems where you could track invoices, inventory, and manage bills of lading.  I worked my day job and at night and weekends began building my software empire.  It was really just a software developer and a dream.  That was nearly three years ago and I am just as dedicated to the cause now as I was then.  Our Sully 2.0 system is a fine cloud based platform to make it easy for you to have a state of the art shipping and receiving system for the price of cable television.  We have mercilessly tested it with professionals inside and outside the trucking industry.  If it can meet their approval then we are sure it will meet yours.

Next week we are unveiling the release of Tony.  This software helps you track the vehicles in your fleet and the maintenance they have undergone.  No longer will you have to rifle through piles of paperwork or try to sift through receipts to know how many times you changed oil or had to repair breaks.  Now you have a simple means to view the information with your smart phone, tablet computer, or PC.  We have also folded Microsoft Tag technology into the system so you can place a simple bar code on the dash of the vehicle and scan it to receive up to the minute information.  We think that something like this is going to make life much easier for your safety and compliance departments.

E₃ also offers other services.  We will be happy to provide agile project management training for your organization.  We also offer web site design and construction to make your company web sites respond to the mobile web and drive more business to your organization.  Finally, we can consult on how to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to spread your message.

We offer all of these services and as we head into our third year we are looking forward to a break out year with customers, new challenges, and lots of stories along the way.  Contact us today and find out how you can join us.

Until next time.

A Moment of Clarity

This is not how we do business. 

Business people are idealized and vilified in equal measure.  For every Geroge Bailey there is a Gordon Gekko, I live in the world of business people.  I have been fortunate to know good business people and I have been cursed to work for a lot of the bad ones.  After a particularly bad day at the office, I sat in my cubical in utter misery.  It was what alcoholics call a moment of clarity.   I decided that I was going to become a business person and I was going to make sure that no one who ever worked for me felt as rotten as I did that moment.

This was why I founded E₃ systems.  I wanted to make business easier for other entrepreneurs by streamlining their shipping and receiving work.  I wanted them to have the power of a Fortune 500 company at a fraction of the price.  I also wanted the system to work over the web so that they could transact business away from the office and spend time with their family and friends.

It was a noble goal and we are going to continue to pursue it.  This week we are releasing another batch of improvements to Sully 2.0.  One of them features the ability to filter addresses so they are easier to find.  We are also coming out with a series of new videos which will show you use our systems. 

It is an exciting time and I can't wait to share it with all of you.

Until next time.

Business Should Be Easy

Find out how we can make business easier.

Business is a difficult activity.  Each day you are grubbing for customers attempting to improve profits and build better services.  So why are you spending your time rifling through paperwork?  This week we want to discuss paperwork and how we can help.

If you are selling goods and services you have to generate invoices.  If you are shipping goods you need packing slips and bills of lading.  Finally, all the goods and services require labels in order for them to make it to their customers via the mail.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could take care of all this without having to hire additional staff? 

At E₃ systems with our Sully 2.0 system does make this possible.  We also use Microsoft Tag technology so that you don't have to purchase expensive bar coding equipment and you can stay on top of what is going on from your office via a mobile phone, tablet computer or laptop.

We want to give you more time to spend on your business and your family.  That is why we created this system for you.  Business shouldn't have to be difficult. 

Drop us a line and we will contact you with more information. 

Until next time.

Now We Support Labels

No Mystery we support Avery Labels

The key to any successful organization is to do the most amount of work in the least amount of time with the maximum level of profit.  It is one of the first principles they teach you in business school and it says with you throughout your entire career.  This week at Dirty fingers we want to discuss one of our newest features for Sully 2.0 which makes this possible; label printing.

I have discovered that many businesses which do shipping and receiving spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to print shipping labels for their products.  This usually requires a mail merge using Microsoft office and trial and error with Avery forms.  We were speaking with a business group and one of the topics which came up was how difficult it was to print Avery shipping labels. 

It took us over a year to come up with a good approach but we finally figured out a way to do it and now we support the printing of Avery 8160, 8164 and 22805 forms directly from the web.  You do not need Microsoft Office or know how to do a mail merge.  Now you just print your labels directly off the web and on to your forms. 

This is a huge time savings because now you just point and click.  This way you can place Microsoft Tags on products and shipping labels on packages with no effort. 

We are pretty proud of this innovation so give us a call and we will be happy to show you. 

Until next time.

This is What We Do

We make business intelligence look pretty.

I have spent over a year promoting and blogging about my company E₃ logistics systems.  What amazes me is as people get to know about my company they always ask me the same questions about what we do.  This week, I want to explain what E₃ systems does.

We help you stay on top of paperwork.  If you have any inventory we help you track the number of items coming and going from your stock with no need to keep track of paperwork.  Our Sully 2.0 system helps you keep track of all your items in our web based system.  You will never have to go searching around the office for a piece of paperwork again because you can pull up the Sully 2.0 system type in a search and find all the information you are looking for.  Not only does this apply to inventory, but to bills of lading, packing slips, invoices and purchase orders.  So in one place you have all the information you need to run your business.

Next, we make it easy to gather business intelligence about the progress of your business.  Fortune 500 companies have entire teams of people who sift through pies of data to gather information about what products are hot and which ones are not.  They can track shipping costs to the penny and find out if they are making a profit with each sale.  At E₃ systems we give you that ability to make you competitive with big boys.  We have a full set of reporting tools so you can track inventory, sales, and other pieces of regulatory compliance documentation.  We included this because many software packages make easy to gather data but difficult to make decisions based on that data.  Now, at a glance you know what you have in stock and if you are making money selling it.

Additionally, we make it possible to track your information via any type of computing device connected to the web.  This means if you have a tablet computer, smart phone or laptop as long as you have a connection to the web you can use our systems in a secure fashion.  No more dialing into company virtual private networks or portals.  No more messing with synching your data with company systems.  All you need is an account and mobile device and you can see your inventory, purchase orders, and invoices 24 hours a day seven days a week.  This gives you more time to interact with your customers and less time tracking down paperwork. 

Next, we bridge the gap between the world of paper and web with Microsoft Tag technology.  Thanks to Microsoft Tag technology, you can scan documents and products.  This gives you the ability to instantly communicate with the Sully 2.0 system.  Now expensive bar code scanning equipment is obsolete.  If you have a smart phone you have what is necessary to track your inventory and systems just like a major corporation.  We offer this service free of charge and make it possible to print up these Microsoft Tags with Avery 22805 labels.  No more mystery about what is on the shelf now you print out a tag stick it on a product and you have an electronic record. 

Finally, we offer this system at about the cost of digital cable television.  If you can afford $120 a month subscription fee we can make it possible to manage your inventory, purchase orders, paperwork, business intelligence and make it available 24 hours a day seven days a week on any device with a web connection.  There is no software to install.  All you need is a web browser or smart phone to access our systems.  The data is secure in our server farm located in the Pacific Northwest and you can reach us via e-mail or phone 24 hours a day. 

If you are interested in how we can help you manage your business and give you a competitive advantage over your rivals then contact us today.  You will not be disappointed.

Until next time.

Caress the Cloud

Cloud computing is not something from Star Trek.  It is
real and useful. 

It is always nice to be leading a trend. Last week, I discussed cloud computing and how E₃ systems are part of this technology trend. This week Forbes magazine is featuring Joe Weinman's book Cloudonomics and they discuss the good uses and possible misuses of cloud technology. What struck me was Weinman's uses of the cloud and how E₃ makes that happen.

First, Weinman talks about coordination, currency, consistency and control. E₃ offers its software as a service. This means that software upgrades only need to be applied once and they are to the cloud. You the customer do not have to worry about upgrading your system because we do that for you using the power of the web. We also do this at no additional cost. This gives you a consistent and coordinated platform to run your business.
 
Next, Weinman talks about cross-device access and synchronization. This means that no matter how you use a service it will show the same information independent of how you view the information. This is a central feature of E₃ Systems Sully 2.0. You can use our system on a PC, laptop, tablet, or smart phone with no worries about compatibility. Our company wanted to make sure that you could get your information anytime and anywhere.

Finally, Weinman talks about checkpoints. This means that the cloud, "…can effectively filter out everything from viruses and spam to distributed deninal of service attacks." In other words, since the service is on the web, it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This makes it harder for a hacker or thief to steal or corrupt your data. Furthermore we encrypt our applications with 128 SSL certificates and password protection.

Taken together E₃ systems and its Sully 2.0 Business Intelligence Solution provides the many benefits of cloud computing particularly coordination of service, cross device access, and checkpoints for security. If you want to find out more about cloud computing and how E3 can help you use the cloud to improve your business contact us today.  We think you will like what we have to say.

Until next time.

Purchase Orders You Can Trust

Tracking Purchase Orders on Your Mobile
Phone is now a snap.

A purchase order should not betray you.  It is a simple piece of paper you fill out and within a few days you should receive the product requested.  The reality is that faxes get lost.  Vendors can be unreliable and you are stuck explaining to your boss why the purchase order has not been filled.

This is a common frustration for business people.  Somehow, there needs to be a better way to track purchase orders.  This is what guided E₃ systems when we created Sully.  Instead of thumbing through catalogs, filling out paperwork, and praying the vendor gets your message; you fill out a simple form and then automatically email the purchase order to the vendor.  If the vendor does not have email you can print up the purchase order and fax it. The beauty of the system is that when you e-mail a purchase order you will receive a message in the Microsoft Outlook telling you when they opened it.  Now, there is no doubt about a vendor receiving a purchase order. 

Better yet, when you receive a purchase order you can instantly place these items into inventory with a mouse click so you have a fully updated record of all the products in inventory.  You can also track a purchase order via a mobile phone or a tablet computer with the help of MSTag.

A purchase order should not betray you and at E₃ systems we understand that.

Contact us today and find out.

Until next time

Inventory is Not Rocket Science

No controvery just a count.

Inventory should not be controversial.  You have products to sell and the longer they sit in your warehouse the more expensive they become.  Products can also get misplaced in the warehouse and stockroom.  It is in your best interest to know exactly how much product you have at any time.
Unfortunately, servicing customers and running your business makes it hard to stay on top of inventory.  Keeping an accurate count of what you are doing takes time.  You have to keep meticulous records.  Many of the business people I run into don't bother or they rely on paper and pencil. 

I find this crazy.  Lean business practices and simple common sense make it clear that not having an accurate count of your products is a recipe for waste.  I took a look at many of the inventory packages on the market and what I discovered is that they were expensive or they were nothing more than glorified VBA applications. 

This spurred me to action.  I thought it was possible to make a simple to use and inexpensive tool that a small business person can use. 

Our Sully 2.0 ® took does the trick.  You can enter your product information one at a time over the web or bulk upload them using a comma separated file.  Once the items are in the system you can see in real time how much you have and where it is located.  Better yet, you can view that information with any device which has an internet connection.  Instead of looking up your inventory among reams of paperwork, you just have to glance at your mobile phone or laptop to see what you have on hand.

We even do the math for you by adding items to your count when you receive a purchase order and removing items from the count when you invoice someone.  People pay thousands of dollors for systems like this.  At E₃ systems we offer this for the price of cable television. 

Inventory is not controversial and it should not be expensive either.  Contact us today and learn more about how we can help. 

Until next time.