| To automate your paperwork you first need to know you can do it. | |||
| Automation | Power Office | Catalog Two | Zen Bytes |
| AUTOMATION |
| May 13 |
Not so long ago a young and bright company man phoned Aestiva. Excited and confident the
company man asked to demonstrate an Aestiva product.Although the company man didn't know it, he was helped by an Aestiva wizard, not a salesperson.
"Joey, a salesperson from one of your competitors told me paper-based systems are old," he told the wizard. "When will you be upgrading," he asked in a half-joking manner.
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| AUTOMATION |
| Apr 23 |
You think you may be ready to automate.Okay, you think you're not quite ready but you are getting there.
Fine, you have only just begun to think about it but you know you want to do it -- eventually.
What usually hinders folks in the beginning stages of an automation is the lack of experience. Let's compare the process to remodeling a kitchen. Maybe some of you have already done this. But remember back when you were new to remodeling and didn't know where to start. It's nerve-wracking and a lot to bite off.
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| AUTOMATION |
| Mar 24 |
SaaS -- Software as a Service. What is it? Your firm signs up for a service - like an on-line expense report service, for example.
You pay a monthly fee based on the number of users you have. There are no computers to maintain. No hidden costs. Everything is on the "cloud." SaaS appears great on the surface.
In this post we use the term Big-SaaS to mean a SaaS service with twenty or more users.
But is it? Big-SaaS has a dark side.
It is based on exploiting a short-term benefit for the customer, while gaining a huge long-term financial advantage over the customer. The short-term benefit of Big-SaaS is "deployment-simplicity."
The dark side of Big-SaaS is its long-term cost to the customer. It burdens businesses with large recurring costs for software that only needs to be delivered once. This is the "why" SaaS will die.
Consider a multi-user business system that costs $40,000. The Big-SaaS will charge $40,000 in the first year and repeat that charge every year thereafter. The internal costs to host the system are nominal. Even with hundreds of users. Nevertheless, the Big-SaaS will repeatedly charge the customer $40,000 for the system they paid for in year one. That's a high cost compared to the industry standard of 15-18% annual for support. In affect, you pay about 400% more than you should after year one. And you're locked in. No option to simply pay a support fee.
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| POWER OFFICE |
| Feb 20 |
You've heard the phrase, "the Customer is Number One"? How about, "The Customer is Always Right"?Of course, who hasn't heard this before? We're sure these maxims are over a hundred years old. But does their prevalence make them correct for business? Is this an honest basis for a relationship?
No, we don't think so. We do better. A company with good products would simply give them away if their customers were "Number One". Businesses would go bankrupt if they truly followed "The Customer is Always Right". And a defunct company helps nobody. These sayings do stroke customer egos, but they are not honest. Nor is it the proper attitude.
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| AUTOMATION |
| Jan 20 |
Most software firms do one or a few things. Some do expense management. Others procurement. Others time tracking and others asset management. It seems everyone these days is a one-trick pony."As specialists we do a better job," they say. But do they? To be fair, sometimes yes. When hunting for a product to manage oil exploration, you want an oil exploration software firm. This is known as a "software vertical." Verticals apply themselves to the "core" operations of a specific business segment.
Non-core operations, such as expense management, procurement, inventory management and time tracking are not vertical. If you need a solution in a highly core arena then Aestiva is (most often) not a good choice. But if you're looking for a non-core automation Aestiva is the better solution. The one-trick ponies are not.
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| AUTOMATION |
| Jan 2 |
Go green, everyone says. Paper kills trees. Paper is wasteful. Let's face it, paper can get out-of-hand. Yes, actual paper has limitations. But those issues aside, the "concept of paper" represents one of the greatest innovations of mankind. Without it, where would be be? Writing on cave walls?We live in the age of computers but the things we do most with the computers is create electronic versions of paper. Emails, doc files, spreadsheets. Things we pass around. Paper.
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| AUTOMATION |
| Dec 15 |
At Aestiva we regularly receive RFQs (Request For Quotes). Most often these RFQs were drawn up by one or two managers with excellent insight into the operation needing automation. The RFQs are simple, straightforward and well-constructed. But some RFQs
we get, to be frank, are ridiculously extensive. Keep reading...
| AUTOMATION |
| Nov 5 |
The other day a software industry exec told us that the lifetime of software is between three and five years. We don't know who thinks up these things, and for a number of reasons we're not buying it. At any rate, the lifetime of an Aestiva automation is
longer than that. We introduced our Power Office automation platform in 2002 and still don't see customers giving up on it. Not after almost a decade.Whether this three-to-five year software lifetime thing is true or not doesn't matter to us anyway. Let the techies chew on that one. We don't create systems with built-in obsolescence - neither obsolescence of desirability or obsolescence of function.
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| AUTOMATION |
| Oct 21 |
If your Aestiva rep told you, "You can probably save millions of dollars with our software" would you believe him?"Ha-hah!"
"Yeah right!"
"Buh-Bye!"
(Sigh). You wouldn't. That's one of the problems we face at Aestiva.
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