Proceed With Caution: This text was written by an actual human. There might be strong opinions, grammatical mistakes and some very intense sarcasm.
Thanks to a suggestion from the visionaries in our development team, I’ve been exploring ways to slowly incorporate our own ERP application into internal operations. At first glance, this is completely nonsensical. We develop, implement and sell software. We are part of a service industry rooted in client relationships, project management and simple accounting processes. Our “Inventory” is non-existent and we have never received a Customer Purchase Order in our 23-year history for license fees or code writing. But what if we took our flagship product and molded it in such a way that we could make it work even though the system is designed for a completely different industry? Is this a great idea or an exercise in futility?
A Thought Experiment
The more I thought about it the more it started to make sense. First of all, we use QuickBooks Online for accounting processes as does a large portion of our customer base. Secondly, we are solely responsible for the development of custom functionality within the system so in any situation where customization would be required, we could make those changes ourselves. Also, our extensive background in integrations using APIs and other techniques gives us an opportunity to connect with additional systems when necessary to automate internal processes. And last but not least, the system would be absolutely free for us to use of course.
Like all of our customers we also have a customer list and we also receive inbound opportunities and requests that amount to quotes or estimates delivered to our customers. If those quotes are approved by our customers we could convert them into sales orders. Work would begin on the sales orders as changes are made to the system and modifications are made to improve user experience. Internally, we could issue Purchase Orders from our Vendors (Developers) to ensure projects go into “product development” in preparation for the eventual delivery. Naturally, we are drop shipping and all of our goods are pre-allocated! When production is completed, we begin testing, akin to allocation in the world of product inventory, ensuring that the right individuals are confirming functionality before delivering finished work to production sites and invoicing the customer. The more I thought about it the more I said “Maybe we aren’t so different after all!”
Taking The Plunge
It was with that old adage that we embarked on our initial attempt to incorporate VISCO functionality into our own internal processes. But how much of our current system architecture could we replace with VISCO and how much could we automate our current manual steps? Turns out the answer is “quite a bit” on both accounts. We found the first opportunity as we began distributing our Automated Container Tracking invoices. Using VISCO Reporting, every month we now query customer databases to see just how many containers our customers are tracking automatically. In doing so, we are able to automatically generate invoices based on those queries within a functional version of VISCO that we lovingly refer to as “VISCO Internal.” You might say we automated the invoicing of our automation.
A second use case for VISCO Internal became obvious fairly quickly as well. With all due respect to our wonderful business partners, we have found some limitations around custom fields in our version of QuickBooks Online. We do currently use another system internally for project management that works quite well but guaranteed uptime isn’t what it should and our ability to customize it is somewhat limited. Therefore, we built out a complete custom field structure where we could store customer information such as go live date and mobile user count for example. In fact, we are always finding new fields we could benefit from, and like all of our customers, adding these fields requires little to no effort.
The Future of VISCO Internal
We are continuing to incorporate VISCO Internal into our day-to-day lives here at the office. We still have a while before we complete and full implementation, but like our customers we understand that incremental progress is still progress and each opportunity to automate and consolidate will be beneficial long term. Any of us that is hammering our internal systems all day with data is excited about what VISCO Internal will be in the future.
Not only can we expect some cost cutting on this truly integrated internal system, but the complete implementation of VISCO Internal will eloquently highlight the flexibility of the VISCO system and the creativity of our team better than any single accomplishment we have achieved already collectively. A real “feather in our cap,” you could say. When any potential customer questions what we are capable of in the future and wonders if our software is “the right fit for their company, ” we will just point to ourselves and say “we’re not just selling the product; we use it ourselves.”
