Observe: Good Data = Good Decisions
Beat the competition with Custom Applications and SharePoint 2010.
If you look at the way you gather and maintain information about your business, and it involves multiple users entering data by hand, a complicated excel sheet with variants owned by different people, or a highly trained engineer chugging through data for days to create a report, then you could get better quality data faster. Your competition probably already is.
In our last post we talked about how to compete in the fast-paced energy market by making faster, better decisions all the way down the line. With our own Air Force captain on staff, we look at speeding up and improving your decision-making in military terms. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Let’s drill down into ‘Observe’ to make sure that you are gathering good data and verifying it. Huge improvements to your bottom line can already happen when you work based on the absolute best observational data.
Decision Making Optimization
Fast, good decisions can make or break your company. If you don’t have actionable data all the way down the line, then your business processes are inefficient, and you are losing money. Your company needs to get the right data to the right people, at the right time and in the right form. Make good decisions from the field to the corner office by keeping the flow of information both accurate and accessible for the people who need it.
We get a lot of inquiries from people who are either running out of time or running out of money, because they are spending huge amounts of man hours updating systems that don’t talk to each other and creating reports that take so long to create that they are irrelevant by the time they reach decision-makers. If you aren’t efficiently updating, then someone is operating on bad data. This is a solvable problem. Read More
SharePoint Branding
So, you have been taking advantage of all the features of SharePoint for several months now; running workflows, updating lists, and maintaining a vast document library. Some off-the-shelf web-parts, a few custom made web-parts, and a portfolio of slick-looking dashboards make up your SharePoint site collection. So what’s the problem?
For one, out of the box the look and feel of Share Point is very Office-like; while it does look nice it probably does not reflect your company’s culture. It is also a fair assumption that the standard icon does not represent who you are as a business. What can you do? Create a custom theme. Themes in SharePoint 2010 software are 100% CSS based, and all the elements that make up each page have a unique class/ID. This allows you to easily modify the appearance of your SharePoint site (font, font size/color, menu colors, background, etc.), however; you cannot change the layout using a theme. So let’s go a few steps further.
Happy Thanksgiving! SharePoint Thanksgiving at Entrance Software.
We love to eat at Entrance, and with all the foodies around, we decided to have a potluck Thanksgiving today! When the idea first started the rounds as an email, our SharePoint team went, “Oh no, we don’t want a thousand turducken jokes clogging our inboxes!” So before we were done laughing about various combinations of turf-critter, Matt, our quick-thinking military man had made a SharePoint Thanksgiving Potluck list.
Engineering software development project completed
It’s been a long journey, but today we delivered the Release Candidate 1 for the software modernization project we announced back in 2009. Our client, a pipeline supplier, now has new and improved software that assists purchasers of pipe in designing multiple segments at a time based on specifications that they enter. Compared to the old product, it has a database that will scale with the company as it grows, in addition to providing capability for users of their software to design multiple segments of pipe at a time and better manage compliance.
Future releases will provide the ability for users to collaborate with their teams to design separate pieces of pipeline and merge them into one project.
What Software Billing Models can I use keep costs down?
SOFTWARE CONSULTING ESTIMATE ACCURACY
Yesterday we covered the dangers of hourly consulting and what to avoid with “free” estimates. Today I would like to share some advice on how to keep costs down on your software projects.
As a customer, you should know that hourly projects will tend to run over the estimated budget more often than under. The larger and more experienced the software consulting firm, however, the better the estimation techniques and less likely to see budget overruns for a given scope of work.
Software Consulting Billing Models
Getting the Most for Your Money
Most professional services offer a la carte or all-in-one billing models. Software consulting is no exception. You may be worried about getting ripped off, and it does take a small investment of time to understand whether what you are being offered is honest, complete and meets the needs of the project.
As you think about what software billing model is best for your company, here is a quick cheat sheet that should offer some pointers of what to be aware of when it comes to consulting estimates:
Engineering Software Development for Pipeline Services
Work is coming along on the engineering software development project we announced last spring. The re-vamped software is progressing nicely, and our software engineers are feeling good about an initial release sometime towards the end of next year. Our client is excited about the work, as they are anticipating that its improved user experience and capabilities will really set them apart from the competition.
One great feature we are really excited about is that the future release will allow purchasers of pipe to perform multi segment pipe design. Currently they can only design one pipe at a time, which is not the best representation of how pipes operate in reality. This will really represent an improvement in productivity and ease of use.
Custom Software Improves Employee Productivity
The right people must have the right tools to be productive. Custom software can be a tool that helps a business reduce the barriers for communication between departments and teams, encouraging collaboration. This results in better decisions and creates a technology multiplier to the human resources of the business, both of which increase productivity.
Centralized Information Storage
The centralization of information storage that came from the development of these systems provides relevant reporting services to multiple departments at once throughout the company.
Custom Software Enhances Company Morale
Morale of skilled employees is directly proportional to the challenges available to those employees. Often inappropriate technology results in engineers and accountants performing clerical “copy and paste” work instead of analyzing information, drawing conclusions, and making decisions. Leveraging custom software allows people to use the right tool for the right job. This makes the completion of mundane tasks thoughtless, in addition to increasing job satisfaction and morale.
Increasing Job Satisfaction
Completion of this project led to generation of custom reports for the client with nearly all of the manual “re-key” work eliminated. The absence of such a repetitive and laborious task through Business Process Automation markedly increased job satisfaction.
Custom Software Builds Customer Loyalty
Loyalty is important in two groups: Customers and Employees. Employees will not be loyal to an organization where it is “hard” to get one’s job done. Technology can enable employees to complete the required workload in reasonable amounts of time, freeing up personal time for leisure activities. Second, customers can be offered unique services using custom software to create customer portals which not only drive the brand of the organization, but also add value to the business relationship for the Customer, increasing Loyalty.
Customer Portals
Geared toward optimizing the customer experience, the creation of Customer Portals gave our client’s customers easy access to documentation and product information. Such convenience is always desired and appreciated by loyal customers.
Custom Software Stimulates Profit
We increase profit by reducing the human cost of business decision-making. Custom software automates manual processes and surfaces timely data. This helps decision makers work that much faster, because they have the information they need. As a result, it is possible to create additional revenue while holding costs nearly constant, which means higher profit.
Increasing Transaction Profitability
This case study describes the custom software Entrance designed to verify transaction data in order to avoid penalties and ensure transaction profitability for Texas’ largest retail energy provider.
Custom Software Increases Sales
The sales of a company are often driven by how well the company can justify its cost through demonstrating its value. In the complex business world of today, this is often a challenge without analyzing mountains of data, but with the right custom software, any business can crunch the numbers and even present real-time cost justification and differentiating features and services to its clients, driving increased sales.
Cloud Computing – What’s your strategy?
What is Cloud Computing ?
First off, It’s important to understand that cloud computing is fundamentally about resources:
- Structured and Unstructured Storage (kind of a hybrid of what you may think of as “RAM” or “disk”
- Compute power (similar to processor or CPU power)
Entrance Software attends Houston TechFest 2009
On September 26th, Entrance Software attended the Houston TechFest 2009 event. Despite taking place on a Saturday, some 850+ tech-hungry participants met at the University of Houston campus to learn more about diverse topics such as understanding the SharePoint object model, Windows 7 for developers and Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5.
The keynote presentation by Sam Gazitt, a product manager in Microsoft’s Developer Tools Group, was a special treat as it is rare to see such a figure from Redmond in Houston. He previewed some of the significant new features coming in Visual Studio 2010 and Team System including the historical debugger, gated check-in and branch visualization.
How To Manage Database Development More Efficiently
VS Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR is a component of the Visual Studio Team System suite of tools. It was formerly known as “DB Pro”. As the General Distribution Release, it is a post-service pack 1 release. It incorporates several of the features slated for Visual Studio 2010 “Rosario”. It also has SQL Server 2008 support.
Test Driven Development in .NET
Test-driven development is a development pattern which is characterized by the use of pre-written test cases which are continuously validated via an iterative, incremental development process.
The basic process is:
1.Write the test.
2.Write the code which is tested by the test from step 1.
3.Validate that the new test and all previously implemented tests run successfully.
The process is repeated for each test until the code is fully implemented.
Entrance Announces a New Client
Entrance is excited to announce signing a new client today for a large software modernization project. The client is a leader in the pipeline industry, and as a service to customers, they provide a software product that helps users plan and design the pipes they need to purchase. The software has become outdated, however, and the user experience needs improvement. This project also represents an interesting engineering software development challenge for Entrance, as we will be including many thermodynamic calculations in the back end that will improve its automation abilities.
Resume Tips
I want to share some resume writing tips. These are all based on actual things I have personally seen in resumes that I’ve reviewed for software developer positions. However, almost all of these tips are generally applicable to anyone writing a resume.
Flexible Custom Software Saves Money!
One of the calling cards of poorly or hastily developed custom software is lack of flexibility: it cannot easily be reconfigured, enhanced or adapted to changes in your business. Rigid software can make adapting your application to evolving business needs extremely time-consuming and expensive. In fact, sometimes it can be more cost effective to consider a “rewrite” than to pursue costly maintenance of inflexibly designed code.