Greetings from the Realtrac ERP Software Development Headquarters,
As detailed in our last blog entry, we are now finishing up the
Beta testing stage of our new Realtrac 10 ERP system. Feedback is great and
we're continuing to add polish to what we believe will be a great product to
our existing and future customers. We took a very aggressive plan in rewriting
Realtrac; Starting from scratch (we literally had a white board, some markers
and chairs on our first day of work) to Alpha testing in just about a years’
time. We're really proud of the speed we were able to produce the product while
maintaining quality.
But the world doesn't stand still in a vacuum over the
course of that year. We continued our dialog with our customers over that year,
and the feedback was nearly unanimous. In 2014, our customers and the market
expect integration with mobile devices. What started out as a "To Do After
Product Launch" became a mandatory feature we needed to have complete for
our introduction of Realtrac 10. We're a nimble team that is ready to pivot on
a dime, so we launched right in to figuring out what we wanted to build and how
we were going to build it.
Everyone internally and externally agreed with that premise,
but we still needed to approach the problem with caution. What problems did we
need the mobile application to solve? Many of our interfaces were already
developed and had been tested; we didn't want to throw out existing work to
support this new ERP software.
Luckily, inspiration for what we wanted to achieve with the
mobile app wasn't difficult. Early in the process of talking with customers, we
saw a near universal problem: Data Quality. The quality of data within an
Enterprise Resource Planning (or, as we like to say, within an Easy Resource
Planning) software is critical. One specific pain point to manufacturing shops
is getting employees to log in and out of jobs, to log completed pieces and
scrap quantities. Realtrac can only provide data as good as the inputs, so when
users forget to log in to jobs, forget to log out or neglect to input piece
counts, the quality of data suffers. As soon as the data suffers management and
administration's trust in the data falls.
As we launch the Realtrac 10 ERP System, we will also be
releasing our Realtrac mobile client to the Apple App Store. The Realtrac
mobile client is designed to allow shop floor employees to log in and out of
jobs directly from their phone or mobile device. At launch we will support the
Apple ecosystem. The app requires iOS 7 and the software will function great on
iPhone, iPod and iPads alike. The Realtrac server PC must be connected to the
internet for the software to function. Your shop floor employees will be able
to log in and out of jobs, log in to multiple jobs at the same time and
register both completed and scrapped pieces. Employees can receive
notifications so if they do manage to leave work without logging out of a job,
they can be reminded. Have no fear Android fans, we've got plans in place for
an Android version as well.
Customers can choose how they want to implement this ERP System. We've talked with customers that have deployment plans that run across
the spectrum. Some plan to buy and install devices around the shop to act like
in place terminals. This plan mirrors the Realtrac 9 Microterminal product
(hardware devices with a small form factor that communicated with the Realtrac
9 server via a serial connection). Some are considering letting their employees
use the ERP software on their own personal devices, and some are even considering
buying devices for each of their employees to use for this purpose.
We expect our customers will immediately see an improvement
in the quality of their data. This should lead to much better costing and
quality data in the Realtrac ERP system, which is a true benefit for everyone
involved. Getting a handle on the true costs of jobs means management can tell
which jobs truly are profitable, and help the business get more of those jobs.
This is just our first foray in mobile development. We are
already working on an application to aid in the training of our Realtrac users,
and expect to follow up with a mobile dashboard style application in the future
as well. We'd love to hear from current customers and manufacturing shops in
general on what you'd like to see in a mobile application.
Think we're on the
right track? Let us know.
(This post discusses ERP software that is currently in
development and testing. Not all functionality is guaranteed.)
