There are a couple of factors that influence target geographies, including the fact that BizAutomation is only available in English, and our offices are located in California.
Most of our customers are currently located within North America, but we are able and interested in working with businesses in Oceana, and the U.K. too. (We are also interested in finding qualified partners that share our values. Interested parties should read through our Partner Inquiries page).
After years observing projects that wildly succeed, those that were successful but ran over budget, and the few that failed, here’s what our most successful customers have in common:
Because it inevitably leads to hidden surprises (not the good kind) which are only compounded by long term contracts. We’re not saying any of our competitors intentionally set out to deceive customers, they don’t, but if it results in the same thing, does it really matter ? It’s just another “hairball” only this one applies to ERP/SCM software, ironically - the very systems built to solve the software hairballs businesses create using individual apps such as QuickBooks - A tangled web indeed.
Hairball #1 - Hidden Add-ons - Hidden add-ons are the bane of our industry, but they didn’t start off that way. They’re unintended consequences that evolved out of multiple editions.
Multiple editions and versions (using the terms interchangeably) are often used to communicate a system’s vertical industry applicability, such as a “Construction Edition” but they can also be used to communicate feature inclusion such as “Standard Edition” vs “Enterprise Edition” intended to appeal to the noble assumption that if you need less, you should pay less. But this approach adds layers upon layers of complexity, and eventually clever product planners will exploit the loopholes, and that’s where things start to go south in the form of a hidden add-on. The problem isn’t the concept, it’s the temptation to leverage it to force the upsell from a cheaper subscription to a more expensive one. For example, maybe today you only sell out of one warehouse, so you don’t think to negotiate or even ask if the version or edition you’re reviewing supports multiple warehouses, only to realize 3 months into a multi-year contract that you need it, and come to learn that you have to upgrade to the “Enterprise” or “Advanced” version to get it, at which point you’ve lost all negotiation leverage - oops!
The only way to avoid a hidden add-on is to flatten your offering to a single edition/version in the first place. Being transparent about which features and 3rd party add-ons exist, or that there’s additional cost for additional use of resources (CPU, RAM, etc..) is what fair business practices are all about.
Hairball #2 - Design compromises - Let’s say you want to sell everything by the app - the ultimate pay as you go model where maybe Sales, Orders, and Invoicing are sold separately, apps every business needs - whether they know it or not. What compromises might await the user interface (UI) engineer ? In BizAutomation the customer record has an integrated UI that just assumes those apps are part of the deal, and efficiently displays a view of all dependencies such as an audit trail of all transactions (not just financial ones). When designing around that kind of complexity, one has to question if the hyper modularized approach increases or decreases clicks and navigation efficiency - we’ll let you be the judge.
Not long ago, going big-tech was considered an advantage, reflected in phrases like “You never get fired for buying IBM”. That’s not necessarily true anymore.
Corporate Culture - Running your business on a single platform requires a vendor you can trust, as companies like “Parlor” learned the hard way (Google “Parlor” and “AWS” if you’re not in the know). This is why we believe (almost) every potential customer will find it refreshing that our leadership believes in running a “none woke” culture where creative individualism and merit, fueled by equality of opportunity, not equal outcome – drive all our decisions. We will never seek to deplatform a customer based on political affiliations, or how they choose to express it, even (maybe especially) if we happen to disagree with it. We can make these promises because we own 100% of the company, and plan to keep it that way.
We consider it a privilege to earn your business, and doing the right thing instead of taking advantage of “leverageable opportunities” when what you don’t know you don’t inevitably happens and are professionally vulnerable.
Communication turn-around - We don’t have layers upon layers of staff so from the first meeting you’ll talk to a true product expert with years of experience able to quicky answer complex questions. At Big-Tech ERP however, it generally takes lots of people, lots of time (over lots of meetings) to get to the same place, and this is the sales phase where everyone’s on their best behavior. This is further compounded by layers of editions, add-ons, and partners. Complexity it turns out, comes with a price (How many employees at big-tech does it take to turn a light bulb?).
Professional Independence - Investors are great for start ups needing capital to get off the ground, we however decided to do it the old fashioned way. We boot strapped our way out of the doldrums, crossed the chasm, and seem to have landed in a happy place. Through it all we’ve remained ethically intact, became profitable, and have an amazing suite for our struggles.
Support Training - Scheduled training is billable work we provide to help administrators and sometimes end users learn the system. It’s commonly provided during the implementation process.
Support Maintenance - Maintenance is the debug work we do to keep the suite in tip top shape, and is offered as part of the subscription at no additional cost. Should you find a bug, we place it into one of three categories.
Like everyone else, 2024 will be the year where AI accelerates its pervasiveness within ERP systems. Our plan is to observe strategies that bring the most ROI and are likely to stand the test of time, and try not to jump on the hype bandwagon.
One of the key areas of AI integration will revolve around our API access to leading AI system, and many of those are going to be evolving throughout 2024.
The least common but gravest are mission critical bugs (fortunately, they’re by far the rarest). They’re deemed mission critical if there’s no work around and is affecting productivity. These issues receive our highest priority and are resolved and updated within 24 business hours.
Next are mission critical bugs that have a work around, meaning you still can get work done, just not optimally, and are resolved within a few days.
Last are minor non-mission critical bugs that have no impact on daily productivity. These types of issues are resolved and updated within the next production build, which can take several weeks.
Is there a 24 hour help desk ? Some competitors offer this type of support, but we do not. If this concerns you, then we urge you to not just take a sales person’s review of their own support, because what commonly happens is that a friendly person will answer the phone any time of the day, but will know very little about how to help, and will just refer you to the help files or may be so kind as to try to look up the answer, which is no different than what you can do your self.