What do you do when the software you need is not on the shelf?

Finding the correct software to run can streamline your work processes; provide a professional presentation and aggregate information and much more.  Knowing what to buy and assessing your individual needs can save you time, money, headache and make your team sustainably more productive.  The most common off the shelf software solutions you can find are for documents, presentations, spreadsheets, financial software, inventory control, Contact management software.  Many times, your industry will also have industry specific software for ordering, search and shared information.   What do you do if you have a problem that there isn’t any software on the shelf to solve?  One solution is to have a custom program designed and implemented to help you solve this problem.

A web based solution is ideal because you don’t have to install any software, you can access the information from anywhere and you can share the solutions with field teams.  In addition, this is often the easiest to implement because all Microsoft server software packages have web hosting software built in.  Also Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Business have web hosting capabilities as well.  All you do is use the Internet Explorer browser that is already installed on all Windows based PCs and can easily access the program. Another advantage of a web based solution is that once you update the software on the server your upgrading is done. There are no updates to pass on to the client machines. 

So with this in mind here are some examples of programs that I have created to help clients become more efficient, provide real time updates on work and allow for communication between staff and management.

Our team has created several custom web based and database driven programs to solved small problems. One example is a simple sign in and sign out program that allows employees to update their work status throughout the day no matter where they are in the country. There are products on the shelf that allow for sign in and out but they wanted something that was specific to their organization and was web based. This way their branch office could sign in and out on the web, they could sign in and out from client sites, and it also solved the problem of different time zones that the products on the shelf didn’t address.    Work status and updates eliminate needless phone calls and check-ins and provide much needed information to provide to your team or client.  

A more complex system I have created is for a contractor in the Tampa Bay area. With over seventy-five technicians in the field and they were manually filling out work orders and turning them into their supervisors, the paper trail was long and inefficient.  Accounting would manually type in and proves these forms in several different systems.   This process took over thirty hours per week to complete. We developed a web based work order system that stores all the work orders in a database.  Supervisors can log into the website and approve the sheets and the accounts payable and run the billing report on a weekly basis. This system cut the amount of time to calculate this billing report from 35 hours to less than 1 hour.

When you are looking at your business processes look at what you do that is a manual process of copying and pasting information between different programs.   There are affordable, custom solutions that can be created to make your more efficient and productive.  Talk to your IT professional or contact HSNS for a consultation on web based solutions that don’t come in a box.