With Realtrac ERP Software, Controlling Profitability Happens Right On Cue!

Manufacturers of all types can benefit from great Manufacturing ERP software, no matter what they produce. At Jacoby Custom Cues they leverage both art and science to produce some of the finest, and certainly the most beautiful pool cues in the world. REALTRAC software allowed Dave Jacoby and his son Brandon to immediately improve profitability by helping them to better track the costs associated with each step in the production of these custom pool cues. 

Finding the Balance Point…

Initial lathe work on a new cue.

When thinking of small and medium manufacturers, most of us envision a family owned machine shop turning out gears, pinions and custom machined metals parts for huge machines. What does not often spring to mind are high end, custom pool cues. At Jacoby Custom Cues they produce some of the finest cues available anywhere in the world. Since their founding  in 1982 they have won dozens of national and international awards for their craftsmanship and design. These custom cues are often designed for a specific individual. They are created for both top performance and beauty. The fine wood working and inlays are what you see on the outside, however, the core and workings on the inside of these amazing cues are every bit as elaborate and functional. Dave Jacoby has always enjoyed pool and as a hobby bought and sold pool cues. The cue manufacturer offered him a lathe to begin to do pool cue repair locally and from there Mr. Jacoby went on to design and build custom pool cues. The business, like so many started in his basement with one machine. Today Jacoby Custom Cues has three locations, 15 full time employees and over 40 machines all focused on producing the finest, custom pool cues available. They are one of the largest and finest producers of custom pool cues in the world.

No Sneaky Petes here…

Every Jacoby Cue is literally a work of art and science. The detail and workmanship that goes into these award-winning cues is immediately obvious. It is the attention to detail, design, focus on process and the right tools that make these cues so unique. In addition to the machines that are used to create these one-of-a-kind pool cues, Jacoby Custom Cues uses ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software from REALTRAC to ensure that their processes and costing are carefully monitored and controlled. These pool cues are every bit as beautiful mechanically as they are aesthetically, and that takes extraordinary attention to detail. These fine cues will never be mistaken for pool hall cues. The exotic woods, semi-precious stones and fine metals that go into creating these cues are all carefully selected and create cues whose exterior beauty is matched by the engineering that goes into creating the insides of these works of art. Inside, the finely machined core, weights and ferrule tenons create a pool cue that out performs almost anything in the market, providing a superior playing experience. Jacoby’s customers range from some of the best known professional pool players in the world to those who only play at home but appreciate a truly fine pool cue. The Jacoby family can also claim some well-known celebrity customers, but discretion prevails and the family would just say that they are names everyone would instantly recognize. One customer wrote the company and told them he was so excited about the cues when they arrived that he took a whole week off work just to play pool all day. Now that is a satisfied customer!

Rack ‘em for for success….

Fine tuning an Irish Linen wrap.

Dave Jacoby started the cue business in the basement of the family home. It quickly grew and they moved into a dedicated manufacturing space.  The business is still growing at a fast pace and they moved yet again into a larger manufacturing space. Jacoby Custom Cues produced about 2,000 cues last year and has generally has about 100 jobs cued up, as they say, at any given time, with over 40 new orders coming in each month. This extraordinary success and fast growth has presented challenges. Not only did the company need to move to a bigger location twice, but the complexities of managing the details of thousands of custom orders a year meant that they needed an easy, and fool-proof way to better manage their operations. Mr. Jacoby found that as his business grew, his sales grew, but his profitability was not keeping pace.  He had to find a reliable way to better cost and price his cues. In 2013 Dave Jacoby and his team started using REALTRAC, an industry leading ERP Software. REALTRAC provides the Jacoby Custom Cues team with the tools to properly quote new business and to manage their costs.  Some high-end Jacoby  pool cues than can easily cost well over $10,000, so manufacturing cost matters. Even a few percentage points of improvement in cost drives hundreds of dollars to the bottom line. REALTRAC also allows the Jacoby team to follow any individual cue through the entire manufacturing process to ensure on time deliveries and perfect quality.  

This attention to detail and profitability is what has allowed Jacoby Custom Cues to grow successfully. They use the right tools, whether it is to set a beautiful piece of malachite into burled maple or to manage the processes on the shop floor, The Jacobys manage every detail almost effortlessly. Jacoby Custom Cues services elite pool players from around the world.  Every detail of the manufacturing process must be flawless to ensure that the completed cue not only looks beautiful, but performs perfectly. Jacoby Custom Cues has been using REALTRAC software for just a few months, but it has already made a different. “I feel like I am still learning about how REALTRAC can improve our operations, but the easy set up and the easy to use interface allowed use to start using the software right away.” Said Dave Jacoby. He went on to add “We immediately saw an improvement in our costing process and in tracking our production, and with as fast as we are growing, REALTRAC made a big contribution to our processes and our profits right away.”

You May Not Be a Pool Shark But you Can Work Like One

Firms of any size can benefit from good ERP software, no matter what their product is. Even the smallest firms will realize a return on their investment within a few months. Every company needs an angle, that trick shot that will make them more productive so that they save time and money. Become a ‘shark’ within your own organization and adopt an easy to use REALTRAC ERP system today.

Contact REALTRAC today to learn more! 734-793-3811

Realtrac ERP Software Development Team - Tablet & Mobile Compatibility

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.)

Success Story: Talsco and Realtrac ERP Software

Learn how REALTRAC customers across the country and across all types of industries use the key features of this easy to use Enterprise Resource Planning to make a real difference in their operations. Companies use different modules to meet their needs, but they all agree: the software is very effective; it is so easy to use that you do not need a company administrator or expert and the return on investment is seen in a matter of weeks.

Read about how Talsco Aerospace Manufacturing uses REALTRAC to save money, maximize efficiency and easily track and meet very high quality standards.

If you aren’t using REALTRAC you are sacrificing profit margin every day. Companies of any size need REALTRAC to remain competitive and profitable.

SOMETIMES YOU NEED A COMPANY SUPERHERO

Jeff Piaskowski, Jose Castaneda Sr. and John Van Note of Talsco

Sometimes, even companies that operate in the demanding aerospace field need someone within their operations who can push every boundary and perhaps, even leap over tall buildings to implement new processes and new software. Talsco Aerospace Manufacturing is such a company and Jeff Piaskowski, the Production Manager, is that kind of company superhero. A medium-sized aerospace manufacturing company, Talsco is a family owned business that was founded in 1968. They serve an elite list of aerospace companies and the US Military by providing highly customized sheet metal components. They have consistently had strong leadership and a highly skilled workforce, but, until a few years ago, did not have the kind of operational focus that would allow them to maintain profitability with the strong growth they were experiencing. Jeff Piaskowski joined the firm and was given the mandate to improve operational efficiency and the vital management support to do what needed to be done.

Stepping into an established family operation and being charged with making big changes is not what most people would consider an easy task, but Piaskowski was just the man for the job; maybe even the company superhero for the job. Talsco had been using one module of REALTRAC’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software to help manage their operations. Jeff learned to use the ERP software and quickly realized he could do more, a lot more, with REALTRAC. Over the next few months, Mr. Piaskowski worked to build his case for each new module he added. Like any crusader, caped or not, he did his homework, learned what each module could do specifically for Talsco Aerospace manufacturing and took his plan to management. He then worked with his team to implement these modules. As a result, the new software modules rapidly improved the efficiency of Talsco’s operations.

Talsco's Management Team

Job Scheduling: Talsco utilizes the flexibility of the job scheduling feature in two different ways.

Everyone can see what jobs are top priorities at all times, ensuring that the entire team is focused on the right projects.

Like many firms, Talsco inputs a project and a start date and immediately know what date they will finish a customer order. On time delivery in the aerospace industry is essential and Talsco is able to provide better than 99% on time delivery. Talsco also leverages the backwards scheduling feature built into REALTRAC. By inputting the delivery date, the system provides the day the job must start in order to be ready on time. “If we start it late or early it will tell us how many days we are behind or ahead. REALTRAC also uses this information to tell us what our highest priority jobs are so that we have full visibility and knowledge of what is ‘HOT’ ” said Jeff Piaskowski. “Everyone can see what jobs are top priorities at all times, ensuring that the entire team is focused on the right projects”, he added.

REALTRAC enables us to schedule all the components in the order they must be manufactured in to produce a complete assembly by a a certain date.

Multi-component Jobs: REALTRAC’s “Tree Module” is used to schedule assembly or multi-level jobs. This is critical for parts that take multiple components and provides a view into the critical path for the entire project. Jeff commented that “REALTRAC enables us to schedule all the components in the order they must be manufactured in to produce a complete assembly by a certain date.” This kind of scheduling ‘super power’ makes complex jobs dramatically easier to manage.

Efficient and Successful Audits: Audits are important at many machine shop operations and when you work in the aerospace industry, preparing for them is an absolute necessity.

We Used to take as much as four weeks to prepare for an audit, now we can prepare in a couple of days. So we save an incredible amount of time and got a perfect audit.

This is critically important. “Not only has the company saved time – lots of time, but our last audit for AS9100 was perfect; not one thing was written up by the auditor and that is huge, in fact nearly unheard of”, Piaskowski said. He went on to attribute the audit’s success to the REALTRAC ERP software that tracks every aspect of the audit. “Even better” Jeff added, “We used to take as much as four weeks to prepare for an audit, now we can prepare in a couple of days. So we save an incredible amount of time and got a perfect audit.”

When we are quoting a new project and setting it up my team has everything they need at their fingertips.

No Time Wasted on Paperwork: Paper work can be a time waster, necessary, but it can delay the start of important jobs; but not at Talsco. Jeff Piaskowski explained why this is so important: “When we are quoting a new project and setting it up, my team has everything they need at their fingertips. They do not need to leave their desks to track down information or materials, and once the job is set up, it can be started immediately, if need be.”

Shazam!

Firms of any size can benefit from good ERP software. Even the smallest firms will realize a return on their investment within a few months. Every company needs a superhero that can fight waste, save time and save the company a lot of money. As Talsco’s own production superhero said: “It would be absolutely impossible to manage the kind of growth and the quality improvements we have seen without REALTRAC”. Become a crusader (cape optional) within your own organization and adopt an easy to use ERP system today.
Contact us today to learn more!

Success Story: Alliance Broach & Tool with Realtrac ERP Software

Learn how REALTRAC customers across the country and across all types of industries use the key features of this easy to use Enterprise Resource Planning to make a real difference in their operations. Companies use different modules to meet their needs, but they all agree: the software is very effective; it is so easy to use that you do not need a company administrator or expert and the return on investment is seen in a matter of weeks.

Alliance Broach & Tool has utilized REALTRAC software for many years. It has streamlined their operations, increased their profit margins and allowed them to support strong growth in their business.

If you aren’t using REALTRAC you are sacrificing profit margin every day. Companies of any size need REALTRAC to remain competitive and profitable.

LEVERAGING THE RIGHT TOOLS MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

Running a small to medium sized machine shop business presents many challenges. Alliance Broach & Tool (part of J& L Turning) in East China, Michigan (Alliance Broach Tool website) has been in the business of building their operations and client base for over 35 years; they know about some of these challenges. In spite of a tough economic climate, however, Alliance continues to grow – a lot, in fact. After thirty six years, that is an impressive accomplishment. “My father always said that if we were not growing the business we were on our way to being out of business” said company president, Mike Johnson. The company is still run by one of the founders, Helen Johnson, together with her son Mike Johnson.

Alliance Broach and Tool’s 28,000 square foot facility in East China, Michigan

Alliance Broach and Tool do highly customized broach manufacturing and re- working for a full range of industries from agriculture to aerospace, from automotive to medical and from marine to heavy equipment. They have continuously expanded their operations and offerings to include highly specialized broaches of all types and specifications including custom spirex broaches and splines up to 84 inches.

Managing hundreds of customers while running a tight, just –in-time operation requires the kinds of management tools REALTRAC provides.

“We are like custom cabinet makers”, said Mike Johnson, everything we do is completely custom and done to the exact specifications of our customers.

Working with hundreds of customers both domestically and internationally Alliance Broach & Tool runs a tight, just-in-time operation. They have also been able to build an international customer base; an important achievement for a smaller firm.

Mike Johnson and Helen Johnson, owners Alliance Broach & Tool

New customers and new markets are always top of mind at Alliance Broach & Tool. One of the tools that they have leveraged to both manage this growth and their costs is ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software from REALTRAC. This one tool often saves companies, even very small firms more money than any tool on their shop floor. ERP software allows even small firms to effectively manage their operations by providing up-to-date information at all times for quoting, costing, and managing projects as the move through an operation. Many small shops believe that using a program like REALTRAC should be delayed until they are larger. By doing so, they can miss a significant cost savings. Alliance's experience validates this, founder Helen Johnson commented “We had a pretty quick return, the improvement in our job planning, cost analysis and floor operations meant that within a matter of months the software paid for itself."

"We had a pretty quick return, the improvement in our job planning, cost analysis and floor operations meant that within a matter of months the software paid for itself."

Small firms can get a large return on their investment. Alliance Broach & Tool’s President Mike Johnson will tell you, that the time and money saved by effectively using ERP software has made a huge difference in their profitability. “The saved history in our system helps us develop quotes more quickly and more accurately, and if I want to know the status of any item on the shop floor, that information is just a few clicks away”, said Mr. Johnson. He estimates that over the years they would have had to add several additional administrative people to do the same sorts of tracking and management that their REALTRAC ERP software provides.

In an increasingly global marketplace, efficiency matters in any size operation. Systems and software that increase your productivity help you remain competitive.

“I know about a project, especially if there is a problem, before anyone from the shop floor comes to my office to talk to me about it.” said Mike Johnson. “Even better,” he added “Once we make an adjustment or resolve a problem it is documented and we don’t have to revisit it later.” This type of efficiency is what shops of any size need to stay competitive and keep their business growing. In an increasingly global marketplace, efficiency matters in any size operation. ERP Systems and ERP software that increase your productivity help you remain competitive.

It is all about the ROI (return on investment). As any small business owner, and especially the owners of a busy machine shop know, running a smooth operation with tight scheduling and minimum inventory levels is absolutely vital to staying profitable and in some cases, staying in business. Often time shops rely on two or three individuals just to manage the operations. Good ERP software means that businesses can operate with less administrative headcount allowing them to hire more productive floor headcount. A strong ERP system tracks the entire job and coordinates the work flow for all current projects and provides instant visibility to the entire team on the floor and in the front offices. It is both the reduction in head count and the ability to optimize work flows that allow ERP systems to pay for themselves within a few months. REALTRAC can be run and leveraged by the entire team. No one individual has to be specially trained to run the system; generating smoother operations and additional cost savings.

ERP systems also help firms prepare for audits and certifications. With a few simple key strokes the documentation needed for nearly any type of audit or certification process can be completed. This regularly saves dozens of hours that can be focused on your business, rather than searching for and compiling documentation.

“We’ve been using REALTRAC software since 1994 and I know it has saved us a ton of money” said Mike Johnson. Building efficiencies into every process means that even small and medium sized firms like Alliance Broaching & Tool get a very fast return on the investment they make into an easy to use ERP system. No matter how small your firm is or how complicated, or streamlined, your operations are, you need to evaluate ERP software. It is no longer something that is just for big business or very sophisticated operations, it is for businesses that want to grow and stay in business. 

Take a tip from the Johnson Family at Alliance Broaching & Tool and use ERP software to streamline your operations so that you can focus on what matters, building your business and your profitability. New generation ERP software will help ensure that your business is passed along to your next generation.

Contact us today to learn more!

Realtrac ERP Software Development Team - Beta Phase Blog

Greetings again from Realtrac Headquarters,

Since the last Realtrac ERP Software development blog, we've transitioned from Alpha testing to Beta testing.  Testing a new product at a customer’s site is always a fun, hectic time. 

We've had some great feedback from all of our testing sites. We haven't had any issues that we'd call showstoppers (big issues where we all drop what we're doing to focus on an issue, and update all customers). That's not to say we haven't gotten great feedback; we have, and we've made changes based upon it. But, we're happy to say the majority of our feedback has been in the form of "We love it, and we want it to do X, Y and Z too!". This is great feedback to get, and we've got a great list of future features and modules. We've got years of new features and modules to work on and bring out to market.

Transitioning from active development to testing doesn't mean the development team has been sitting on our laurels. We've been tackling a whole bunch of new tasks, and even managed to add some new features to the product based on the feedback from our amazing alpha and beta testers.

On the task front, we've been busy doing writing and editing our manual and quick start guides.  Our approach to both documents is guided by the main principles of our ERP software. We say Realtrac is “The Easy Resource Planning” (ERP) software, and that needs to be reflected in our documentation as well as the product itself. I doubt we'll be able to make something that someone curls up next to a warm fire and reads by the flicker of candlelight. But if our documentation can actually help users solve their business problems, feel empowered to use our ERP software and learn all its features, we're going to be pretty happy campers.

We're also working on a series of videos to help our users get started, and eventually, feel comfortable to use all the powerful features of the product. Having videos available at a user’s finger tips is required today. One of the most common things we've heard in the past 18 months of working with Realtrac users is "I didn't know it could do that!". For any complex ERP software product (and, as easy as Realtrac 10 is, it's still a product designed to run your business, and it is an in depth product) this is natural. It's impossible for someone to know everything about a product; Learning is a function of practice and exploration. But still, we want to close that window as quickly as possible. Instead of having a customer take 6 months to master the product, we're hoping our video series takes a Realtrac user from neophyte to expert much, much quicker. If that fails, we're working on our backup plan of cloning all of the development team and shrink wrapping them in boxes to send to customers. So far we've had minimal success, but we'll keep working on it.

I did tease that we have added some new features, so I would like to take a moment and highlight some of the great new features that are going to be present in Realtrac 10 at launch.

The process of ordering material for upcoming jobs can be incredibly difficult and time consuming. We've been working with customers to try to develop some tools to help Realtrac users solve this problem. We're launching Realtrac 10 with a Material Resource Planning (MRP) feature that will make material ordering much easier. Using the powerful search and browse capabilities built in to Realtrac 10, users are able to easily see a list of the materials required for all upcoming, or a specific set of upcoming jobs. Want to see the materials required for jobs of 'Customer XYZ' set to start in April? No problem. Wonder how much 4140 3" Round you need for jobs in the next 3 months? No problem.

Once we had the foundation of the Realtrac ERP system in place, we decided to address some additional needs for our existing and future customer base. All manufacturing shops need a quality process; it’s just a matter of when they implement it and how vast the ERP system needs to be. Even if a customer doesn't need a strict quality program in place today, as part of the growth of their business, eventually they will need one. We wanted to ship Realtrac 10 with tools in place to let a business grow in to using our simple yet powerful tools.

Realtrac 10 will allow a user to create and save both non-conformance (NC) and corrective action (CA) reports. These reports are easy to produce, meaning they are easy to understand and integrate with existing workflows. A difficult tool is one less likely to be used, understood and adopted. And an unused quality system is worthless.

Using our built in messaging system, we can automatically warn users when they are building a part that has had non-conformance of corrective actions filed against them. Our quality tools, built in to the base product, can help satisfy many demands on your business:

• Satisfy the needs of specific customers and/or specific industries that require a quality system in place.
• Combined with policies, the Realtrac quality system can be an important part of the quality systems and certification.
• The built in messaging system allows Realtrac users to actually use the NC and CA reports to ensure they are profitably building parts.

Well, back to work. We'll write another entry here shortly about the Realtrac 10 Mobile App.  Coming soon to an iOS device near you!

The Realtrac ERP Software Development Team

Realtrac ERP Software Development Team. Alpha Phase Blog

Greetings all,

This is Matt from the Realtrac development team. As you've probably heard, Realtrac is busy preparing a brand new release of the Realtrac ERP system. A little more than a year ago, myself and a group of talented developers set out to rewrite Realtrac from scratch. Our job was a tough one. We wanted to build on the obvious strengths of Realtrac while bringing it up to current standards. 2013 sure is an exciting time to be writing job shop software. Computers are fast and powerful, letting us provide more functionality in Realtrac while maintaining it's speed and ease of use. In addition, everyone uses the web, people have miniature computers in their pockets and data is no longer siloed in it's own locked up store.

Realtrac has lots of announcements coming up about these sorts of capabilities But first, I just wanted to give everyone an idea of just what we've been doing for the past year.

Writing an ERP system is a pretty monumental task. What at first may seem like a simple set of screens with some accounting figures, is, to quote the most lovable green animated figure I know, Shrek, "like an onion". Onions, like an ERP system, have many layers. What on the surface appears to be some simple accounting figures and statistical data turns out to be a set of complex business rules underneath. And most importantly, all the data talks and interacts with one another.

Rewriting an existing product like Realtrac only compounds the difficulty of the task. We want to write a system that's friendly to existing Realtrac 9 users, while opening it up and making it more powerful than ever. Keeping the simplicity and speed while providing a platform that would let a small business grow, and would let Realtrac grow with it.

So our first few months around the office looked a lot like a college classroom. Developers learning the basics of Realtrac. Talking with our experienced sales and support team to understand the breadth and depth of our customer base. (The most important thing you learn is that no 2 companies do things the same, and writing software to help rather than hinder them is a difficult task.) Whiteboards were furiously drawn upon, then erased and started over from scratch. Repeat, repeat!

But eventually, we found ourselves with a great foundation to build the "Next Generation" of great ERP software upon.

The next step? A bunch of highly talented software developers (I often call us "nerds", but I'm not sure everyone appreciates it as lovingly as I intend it) put our nose to the grindstone and got to work. We've also been very lucky. Every one of our coworkers, from ownership to management to our awesome sales, support and office staff has helped us along the way. They frequently threw fresh coffee (yum) and chili (yum) in to the office to keep us going. Every 3 weeks we'd have a big meeting with our entire team and show off our progress. This constant feedback loop meant we never strayed too far off task, everyone saw what we were doing, and our momentum just kept building.

This past August, we had several milestones that were a pretty huge deal. First, we had an amazing group of our customers take the time out of their busy work schedules to come here to Livonia and spend a day with us looking at the new product (more on that in a minute). Second, we shipped our first official build of Realtrac 10 to our "internal customers" (a fancy way of saying, people other than the Realtrac nerd team started using our software. For a developer, there's nothing quite like that feeling of a year or more of work culminating in people actually using your product. It's really fun to build new things and release them to the world.)

Oh, so yeah, along the way we had some awesome customers come in, take a look at our product, give us feedback and help us determine where we are going in the future. Needless to say, it was a busy day. Even better, everyone liked what they saw and were ready to deploy Realtrac 10 at their organizations!

As we sit here in December, we're ready to enter in to yet another new phase.

All of our Realtrac team have been using Realtrac 10 since August, and in November we commenced on our Alpha testing at an existing Realtrac 9 customer location. Our alpha test has gone amazing. We've gotten some great feedback and redesigned some systems. Build, test, fix, repeat. Every bit of feedback, every change that goes in makes the product better than it was immediately before.

This new phase I speak of? This week and next, we are deploying Realtrac 10 at a select number of customer sites as Beta tests. These customers are kind enough to invite us in to their place of business, take time out of their schedules to learn a new product, test the product, and give us feedback. For many of our customers (and likely you as well), their time is the most precious asset they have. So we understand what a great gift this is that they are sharing with us.

Good news for them though is that in exchange for their time, we're looking to deliver an amazing ERP system that builds on the strengths of Realtrac 9, while delivering all sorts of cool new functionality.

Hopefully this gives everyone a quick idea of what life is like here at Realtrac HQ, development department. After our first set of Betas, I'll post a quick update to let everyone know how it's going. And we still have that issue of all those vague teases I mentioned in the introduction. More on those, and some of the great new features in Realtrac 10, later.

The Top Ten Reasons for Your Company to Use REALTRAC ERP Software as Your Pace Car!

The Top Ten reasons for your company to use REALTRAC as your Pace Car!

1. Pole Position – REALTRAC will give you the power to be the leader of the pack in your industry by being recognized as the best in quality, innovation and customer satisfaction.
2. Analysis – REALTRAC will show you an analysis of your company. A grandstand view of each customer, each vendor and each product line or service – What you find may be surprising, but your investment will quickly pay off.
3. Profitability – Owners constantly look for ways to change or adapt their business for maximum profitability. REALTRAC gives you a view of your income and expenses which allows you to measure your current and past profitability and project future profitability. This allows you to analyze and assess your current status which in turn helps you make the decisions for a maximum Return on your Investment.
4. Growth – The sole purpose of a business is to grow. Companies grow organically because needs change all the time. REALTRAC offers a synopsis of your company’s structure. Shows you where opportunities for growth exist and gives you the confidence to make those big decisions that every owner has to make.
5. Pit Crew – REALTRAC is the industry leader in product support. With over 50 years of experience our Account Specialists and Tech support team are unparalleled. They will offer you the guidance and confidence for maximum usage of the REALTRAC machine shop software.
6. Efficiency – REALTRAC allows you to find new ways to optimize operational efficiency in order to increase productivity and reduce costs. REALTRAC gives you Real Time access to information so that owners can identify key requirements and challenges on the fly and then align solutions to make solid business decisions without delay.
7. Leverage – Being in business is about teamwork. Leverage your staff and employees by allowing REALTRAC to give them the confidence about the role they are performing, its importance and clarity about the benefits to be gained if they deliver, then you’ll see productivity soar.
8. Tracking – With REALTRAC, whether its sales estimates or shipping, you have much less of your business to manage. REALTRAC assists the status of your entire operation; from management to inventories to implementation.
9. REAL TIME – REALTRAC is Real Quick in Real Time with Real Profits. The job shop software plays a significant role in improving your business by giving you access to real-time manufacturing data to improve operational and personnel decision making, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
10. Finish Line – REALTRAC gives your business the much needed horsepower to win the race to the checkered flag by optimizing your business’s performance. This leads to more profits, revenues, market share and brand influence.

Join the REALTRAC family and WIN the business race today!