Overcoming Limitations: Obstacle or Opportunity?
Getting What You Want
Even When It Isn’t In What You Bought
How often have you been frustrated because what you want to do – and it seems easy – is either difficult or impossible in the software you are using?
All software packages have limitations, no matter how extensive and robust they are. All have basic assumptions on how tasks will be accomplished. Those assumptions may not hit you until you want to report on the data or display the data in different ways. For instance, is everything about a person stored in their “record” or is some of it linked to other “records” like subscriptions or orders or status? Is that “link” a field you don’t even want to populate? Are you able to get order information directly from the product ordered or is it scattered in transactions in a sequential transaction file? Sometimes those limitations cause annoyances or inconvenient workflow for the software users. Sometimes there is no workaround available.
We hope our customers are never inconvenienced by limitations or alternate world-views that may exist in the software we use. But we know it is not always true.
PDG Commerce is no exception to this observation. It may be price-y to get what you want, but it is possible to change the way Commerce works so that your users do not have to be inconvenienced. Do you want to offer a wizard-like experience to cut through the navigational challenges of displaying relevant data cleanly? Do you want to limit complex sets of options in certain situations? Do you need to alter the way some customer data collection happens or suppress fields based on options chosen? Do you have extra charges or options that only apply in certain circumstances more complex than is supported “out of the box”?
Just because the software you use has limitations does not mean you and your customers are stuck with those limitations. Think about how you would like things to work. Ask us what might be possible. Consider whether the solution is worth the estimated cost. It just might be.
Health Care and the Small Business
Editorial
I want to take a moment to address our US-based clients and say something about health care, not to try to change your mind or persuade you to any particular position, but to encourage you to become involved in the national debate about health care reform and to tell your congressional representatives what you want. Let me explain a bit about health care from the perspective of a small business owner.
Hen’s Teeth Network has four employees and the company provides health insurance for them. Why do we do this? Because I believe that we all need insurance and the most cost effective way to get it is through an employer-purchased program (versus each of us going out onto the open market). We all now have insurance, and our dependents have insurance, and there are several bizarre circumstances here.
The first oddity is that I, Art Zemon, have become the Benevolent Dictator of Insurance not just for my wife and me but for my employees, their wives, and their children. Now I’m a great guy and all but how in the heck am I supposed to decide what is the right health insurance policy for a college kid that I have only met a couple of times and about whose health I know nothing? I do get to decide, however, because as a company with only four employees, we are too small to have a “cafeteria plan.” Whatever I choose has to work for all of us, employees and family members.
The second oddity is that my choices are ridiculously limited. Since Hen’s Teeth Network is a very small company and has employees in three states, I get to choose from a whopping total of two insurance companies. Were each of the four of us to shop for insurance only in our home state (as individuals), we would have a wider range of options but the cost would be much greater.
The third oddity concerns cost management. We run a pretty tight ship, keeping a close eye on expenses across the board. As a web hosting and design company, our three biggest expenses are, in order, our people (by a huge margin), fees for hosting web sites, and health insurance. The next biggest expense, credit card merchant account fees, is a fraction of the health insurance. Of those three biggest expenses, only health insurance is completely out of control. We have seen year-to-year changes ranging from a decrease of 18% (which tells me that we were significantly overcharged in the preceding year) to an increase of “just” 9%. I expect a 20% to 25% increase in August 2010. I deal with no other vendor with such unstable pricing and, had I a choice, I would refuse to deal with any such vendor.
I strive to provide an outstanding and supportive work environment for my employees. Through some accident of nature, choosing their health insurance has become part of that process.
I strive equally hard to provide high value services to our clients, at the lowest possible cost. Through the same accident of nature, the prices we charge for web hosting and design are directly affected by the cost of health insurance.
Many people are unaware of the employers’ costs for health insurance so I will raise the veil. Hen’s Teeth Network will pay about $18,000 to insure four people this year. That, of course, is not the entire cost of providing health care for the four of us; we will each pay significant amounts in deductibles and co-pays. Do we get the value that I think we deserve for these thousands of dollars? No, I do not believe we do.
I encourage you to contact your senators and representatives. Tell them what you think of this issue and what you want them to do.
Art Zemon
President, Hen’s Teeth Network
Customer Site News
This month we are featuring sites for whom we have done custom programming.
One of our customers recently launched a new web site. Though this site is not one HTN designed, we were involved with the site on a custom programming task of considerable size. We were asked to integrate Salesforce.com with a proprietary administrative/member system the site uses. Though you can’t publicly see the results of our efforts, we are proud nonetheless to point you at their new site. Mankind Project International is a service organization whose site speaks for itself.
Marshall Street Disc Golf had a problem with gift certificates. They had hundreds out in the field that were created before they started to use PDG Commerce. They did not want to make customers jump through hoops in order to redeem them. PDG Commerce did not have any way to enter numbers that it did not generate. We were able to batch load the existing numbers and associated amounts directly to the database. PDG Commerce happily uses them correctly. And the customer was saved even knowing that they were using numbers created in a different system. Their gift certificates just work. Whether you hold a gift certificate or not, their site is worth a visit just to admire the wide assortment of discs they offer.
A2Z Uniforms is another case of program integration. They use PDG Commerce for their online store, MOM (Mail Order Manager) for their order processing and Uniform Solution for their inventory. They have a huge inventory and not every item is available in every combination of options every month. The task I want to mention here was to take their entire Uniform Solution inventory and populate Commerce products, but only load those products in the option combinations that exist in Uniform Solution. This process runs periodically to keep Commerce data real. The other challenge was how to readily display the options available for a scrub top, for instance, when the size ranges and color options create a huge grid. How do you prevent folks from selecting combinations that are legal but not in stock for that particular set of choices? You will see an example of the display here. Click on the little grid of size and color to see the popup that displays the actual combinations available. If you need scrubs, this is the place to go.
3B Supply has been in this column before for its custom quick order form. A new feature available only to logged-in members is a custom order history page constructed from data kept in an external central ordering system (Acctivate) rather than the PDG Commerce order detail. Line item by line item, the customer can see whether the order has shipped or is pending. This form also allows the user to readily re-order and to print or download the data. The order data, though maintained in Acctivate, is up to date and available through the Commerce interface. A periodic import task keeps the data Commerce displays fresh.