I promised myself that by this time this week last week's major headache would be solved. And I think it is. I have set up a production schedule, with assignments and due dates. Seems straightforward, but of course, I have to do it all online with a SQL server backend so I can see the same data that someone "on the ground" at the production facility can see. We are not a company that was built on forms drafted in triplicate and filed somewhere. We depend upon data and it has been a week for serious data crunching.
On a similar note, we have a need for sales forecasting in order to order the right amount of stuff every month. Duh. Pretty simple, I know. My lovely spouse is wonderful at crunching numbers. We downloaded and installed Crystal Reports IX. Long, tedious process. We come to find out that we cannot actually view the nice reports online, but have to 1)Open Crystal Reports, 2) Run the reports we want, 3) email them to someone. What happens if I forget to do this? What happens if they finally put me in an asylum somewhere? How will my staff get the reports they need? Oh yeah, and it cost $600.
Crysal reports has web services---but you have to dig into the SDK and install, at the very minimum, a .DLL on the server. Ours is a shared server and our hosting provider won't let us install that paticular component----the reason: a bad rep for being unstable and crashing servers if the query sent to it is even midly malformed. Good enough. We don't want that blood on our hands anyway.
So he---duh---just took the same queries and put them into a plain ol' ASP page. Easy enough. Within a day we had the reports we needed and they can be viewed from my outpost I am creating for myself in the future on a small island in the Pacific.....this is what I am planning for now. So, why, would I buy that piece of software? I am not sure still what the ROI is-----
I did things like make sure our door has a sign, that my staffers are set up on a really cool piece of software called Employee Task Chaser (www.VeritaskSoftware.com). We had developed a dumbed-down version of this during our last holiday, because we quickly found that if we were not available, things did not get done in a planned, organized way. My version was OK, but this little piece of software is very useful and a critical tool.
And now I realize I may have given my competitors an edge. I'll be quiet now.
Comments