What piece of software could your business really use?

[slapmatt]

As a application developer with a bit of time on my hands I'm looking towards the PH business community for ideas of software that would really make their lives easier.

Any ideas, suggests greatly received.

[Don]

[cynic]

In my experience Businesses rarely come up with the idea for a system.

You *show* them a system. *Tell* them how it can/does/could/should save them money and only cost them peanuts.

Then they take at least a year to decide whether or not saving some money is a good idea. Then a small subset of the people you show it (working!) to decide that they'll argue for a discount before perhaps buying some of it.

[/cynic]

Whatever you do - its better for the application to deal with the sales process than the delivery process, or support process and certainly than any internal processes. And its better if it helps make sales than reduce sales overheads. That gets people excited.

Sadly we make software to make internal management of some HR processes slicker and cheaper. Not as close to the money as it should be.

Good luck!

[arfur]

One that makes people go shopping and come into my shops and buy stuff .... That would be really good when it's p1ssing it down

[SGirl]

Something that would allow me to store a database indicating work done and booked in, which then creates invoices automatically from the DB records.

[rsvmilly]

Something my employers are looking at more and more is document management.

[Plotloss]

Templated and Simple Transaction based quoting system, run from a single inventory.

So the ability to pick and choose a bill of materials of a given type for some jobs

Plus the ability to entirely bespoke a quote if neccesary.

Would save me hours.

I could probably write it myself but I just dont have the inclination anymore, theres far more other stuff to do.

[justinp1]

rsvmilly said:

Something my employers are looking at more and more is document management.

I would agree on this one. Part of the Data Protection Act is now keeping customer information secure. Someone I know with clearance at a PLC with millions of UK customers walked around his building easily logging onto unprotected wireless networks!

Perhaps a document encription package?

[justinp1]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Strangely enough a lot of the things that people are looking for are sufficed by the 'ACT' software package. I have used it in my business for the last 5 years or so. It automatically dates/times notes when you put them on and links word files to the notes. The email addresses on their files are even hyperlinked to your email package. You can also program reminders to call contacts etc which will pop up on the screen with your contact details and what you need to contact them about.

There is also the option for many users to use the same database, so each contact can be seen and updated by everyone.

Thats just scraping the surface of it.

For the newest version its about £150 a copy, but I got two licences copies of the old version off ebay for about £10 each.

[RichBurley]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

This can very easily be achieved by operating the Calendar part of MS Outlook, then granting permissions to the people using it, via the network. It's dead easy, and you've propbably already got MS Office installed on your PCs?

[Don]

RichBurley said:

anonymous said:

[redacted]

This can very easily be achieved by operating the Calendar part of MS Outlook, then granting permissions to the people using it, via the network. It's dead easy, and you've propbably already got MS Office installed on your PCs?

Its the granting permissions bit that's the trick on that one. Our application writes holidays/absences/etc from our database to a user's Exchange Calendar if they want it to...and making that work requires quite a bit of Administrator time.

[mc_blue]

slapmatt said:

As a application developer with a bit of time on my hands I'm looking towards the PH business community for ideas of software that would really make their lives easier.

Any ideas, suggests greatly received.

If you could develop a Garage Management software - something that is compatible with Turbo Dispatch - I'd be more than willing to trial it for you. I don't know how much money there would be in it - you'd be looking at getting 200/300 garage on board but would require support during office hours.

This is the current one (of two on the market) which we use. It costs approx £300 (including a few licences) and then a frankly disgusting £50 per month in 'support' on a national rate phone number. The support guys are a bunch of clowns too.

One is called Garage Manager and the other is called Vtrak.