Clevertech Blog

Hall Street Storage has been a Brooklyn landmark since 1931, when the multi-building warehouse, nearly a city block in size, was built. They’ve remodeled and updated in some exciting ways. They’re now the biggest green business in New York City, using 100% renewable energy for their self-store division and taking recycling to new heights, but one thing stayed the same until very recently.

There was one woman who knew everything. When a delivery arrived at the warehouse, she would sit down with the customer, a calculator, and a piece of paper, and work out all the details and the costs. Without her, that process couldn’t be done. Even with her, it was a lengthy process, but it was part of the experience.

Hall Street used a computerized system, a DOS program that required that everyone key in commands. Again, only the experts who knew the commands could use it, and it was a lengthy process, but it worked well enough.

Until February 15th. The system stopped working, and Hall Street couldn’t send out the February bills. They called Clevertech.

We went to visit them. We looked at their operations, listened to their concerns, got to know their business thoroughly, and in less than a month we built them a warehouse management system that takes care of their inventory and accounting.

Now, when a delivery arrives, anyone can key in the details on the warehouse receipt form. The shipment is assigned a lot number and a location according to its need for refrigeration or freezing or dry storage, the weight or number of items is entered, and the costs are automatically calculated. When customers come to collect their inventory, a delivery ticket shows how many items have been removed, and automatically recalculates the charges. Recurring costs are automatic, too, and every customer has an account with a running total.

Hall Street can check on a given item, on a particular room, or on a customer. If there is a recall of an item, they can easily see where each item is and when it arrived. They can see how much space is available in each room so deliveries can be routed to the best place for optimum use of their storage. Customers coming to examine their inventory or to retrieve their goods can be directed to the right place immediately.

The process was painless. We met with them weekly during development to get their feedback and to move the system ever closer to their ideal.  We replicated what was familiar and comfortable: “Things are called what they wanted it to be called, ” as developer Brad Newman puts it.

We fixed what they didn’t like. For example, it used to be impossible for Hall Street to see a customer’s account information without printing out a statement. For this green company, the waste of paper was an extra frustration added to the time spent. Now, they can pull a customer up on the screen.

We fixed some things, too. Better reporting has made a difference for Hall Street already, and will continue to do so. Clevertech was able to export the historical data from the antique software system and migrate it into the new one, so Hall Street now has a wealth of data which they can analyze in ways that haven’t been possible before. The expert’s intuitions are still important, but now data-driven decisions are possible.

Hall Street Storage is a perfect example of a case in which an expert’s specialized knowledge could be incorporated into a custom software solution, thereby adding value to the business. Processes are more efficient and less frustrating, costs are reduced, and the entire workflow is streamlined in ways that improve life for the staff and for the customers.

As for the expert, her intensive knowledge of the business can be directed toward more creative tasks, instead of the routine business of calculating the costs of each delivery. Clevertech worked with her to get her knowledge into the warehouse management system, where it now constitutes valuable capital for the business, and she is freed up for more challenging work that takes better advantage of her years of experience.

Clevertech can do this for you too. Call us to begin the conversation.

Permalink  |  Published in Business Strategy, Expert systems, Technology Tactics

You need to keep in touch with colleagues, clients, prospects, and customers. If you had all the time and all the staff you could ever need, then you could do this with paper and pen. Or a spreadsheet and email. But you don’t have unlimited resources, so you choose a a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. The object is to stay organized, to document your contacts with all these people, and to make sure the contacts actually get made.

There are essentially three web-based options for CRM.

First, there’s Salesforce, ubiquitous among enterprise companies. Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM system that does an impressive assortment of things. It collects and sorts your sales leads, routes them to the appropriate member of your sales team, offers a variety of dashboards for each department  that integrate with other online applications so you can see Google maps of all a prospect’s locations and their credit info, maintains a content library which allows you to update Power Point presentations –

Most companies aren’t using all the features. In fact, most of the companies we’ve spoken with who are using Salesforce are frustrated with it.

What’s wrong with having a system that does more than you need?

• It increases the learning curve. Most of us use about 15% of the capacity of ready-made solutions — but we still have to learn all of that software before we can tell which 15% is the part we really need. What’s more, the entire staff needs to learn it. Add up the training hours — more for the less tech-savvy in the company — and you’ve got a sizable investment of time.
• It leads to hacks and workarounds. We end up trying to fit the way we work to the software, instead of working in the way that’s best for us and for our company. Salesforce is designed for enterprise-level companies, with multiple departments which may not be well integrated. Using it can force smaller, more agile companies to think like big corporations, which may not be what they want.
• We have to pay for all of it, even though we don’t need all of it. Salesforce runs $65 per user, per month. In a year, your growing company can pay $30,000 to $50,000. And you won’t own anything.

Compare that with Solve360. Solve360 combines CRM and project management capabilities in a simple system of shared virtual whiteboards in a shared online workspace. Sales leads are kept where everyone can see them, not routed to the executive in charge of that division. The main screen lets team members keep track of everything that’s going on, instead of doling out information according to departmental membership. You can upload files, use Google Docs and other familiar systems, and hold discussions right there in the shared space.Your company can use the service for a year for a couple thousand dollars.

We also like the fact that, when we went to get acquainted with the system, the CEO of the company walked us through it. That says something about the company.

Highrise is another nimble tool from 37signals, the outfit that brought you Basecamp. Combining a way to keep track of contacts with clients and prospects and a way to keep track of scheduled tasks, Highrise meshes with your personal GTD system as well as with other tools and systems your company may already use. You can use it on your smartphone to check a client’s previous interactions with your company while you make a call, review all the interactions between two companies, or see where everyone is with assigned tasks related to an individual. You can set up text reminders for future contacts, too. The cost is a small fraction of the cost of using Salesforce.

Highrise and Solve360 are alternatives to Salesforce. They’re more nimble, and give more flexibility. They’re less of an investment, too. Are they going to be perfect for you and your company?

Possibly not. You know a lot about how to make your business successful. What if you could get that information into your CRM? Not only would that improve your immediate workflow and systems for greater productivity and efficiency right now, but it will also increase the value of your company. Integrating that intellectual capital into your software systems makes those systems into assets for your business.

And that’s where the third option comes in. Clevertech can customize the functionality of any of the solutions we’ve discussed to make them perfect for your company’s needs now and in the future. This is one of our services: building things just the way you need them.

If your company is prepared to spend $30-$50k (the cost of using Salesforce for one year), then you should have us build exactly the right thing for you. Need a smaller customization? We can make your CRM work just right for you with that special application. Call us at (516) 869-4970, or contact us with our simple contact form and we’ll call you.

Permalink  |  Published in Business Strategy  |  2 Comments

Businesspeople, according to a recent post at the Harvard Business Review’s blog, don’t like to work with IT.

Here’s proof:

• 75% of business leaders recognize the critical importance of IT.
• 30% identify IT needs when developing strategies
• 8%  are held accountable for IT  success.
• Internal technology is one of only four items that measurably affects firm performance
• It’s #16 out of 20 on a survey of the things business leaders believe will improve performance.

Is it really that business leaders dislike IT? We think that the negative feeling toward technology stems from not knowing how to work with it.

Here’s another number for you: only 27% of business leaders feel smart about IT. How much do you enjoy doing things that make you feel stupid?

At Clevertech, we have tech people with top business school degrees. We know how rare it is to be equally proficient with both. Our marginal utility is in translating the management and financial speak into technology.

We do this for our clients with custom software and systems. But we’re planning to share our proven abilities in this area in a seminar in the near future.

We’re currently preparing the seminar, “How to Get More Out of Your IT,” for the New York City area.We’ll be focusing on both personal productivity and business productivity, through technology.

First, we’ll be looking at ways that readily accessible technology can increase personal productivity, reduce stress, and improve your work life:

• Why the browser you choose matters, and how extensions can amaze you.
• Ways your phone can be something you swear by — not at.
• The inside tricks that make your computer your partner in productivity.
• Free tools and services that enrich your workday.
• Things your mail program can do for you that you never knew it could.

Then we’ll be looking at business technology — whether you do it yourself or go to your IT department and say, “Why don’t I have this?” — that will supercharge your company’s productivity:

• How defining processes properly can fast track the rest of the process.
• The difference the user interface makes.
• What iterative processes and exception handling can do for you.
• Why your IT department should be using Javascript to make your life easier.
• How data visualization can revolutionize your systems.

And much more. If you’d like to stay in the loop on the details of this event, contact us and we’ll make sure you get the word.

Permalink  |  Published in Business Strategy, Technology Tactics

One of the things that is most challenging for the human brain is to keep track of situations in which there are a lot of interdependent variables.  We can really only keep about seven things in our minds at one time. So, give us something like a wedding reception, with the need to keep the menu, all the participants, the space, the flowers, the music, the photographs, the drinks, and the thousand and one tiny details all straight in our minds at once, and the result can be extreme stress.

Put the wedding reception onto a calendar filled with similarly complex and important events, add a large staff and numerous different venues, and you have the situation faced by RAM Catering, an elegant kosher caterer in Manhattan.

We’ve said that this is a challenge for humans, but the truth is, in many ways it’s more difficult for a spread sheet. No wonder many caterers rely on a barrage of Post-It notes, files bristling with notes, and a lot of extra time to sort everything out.

Ram took a different approach: they called Clevertech.

We built them a rich interface application that solved the problem. The interface has multiple screens that suit the way RAM’s managers like to work. Each manager has a dashboard — you can see an example at the top of this post — that shows the events coming up and has a project management element allowing a quick check that the contract has been sent, the contract and deposit have been received, etc.

From this dashboard, the manager can go in and set the menu:

The menu screen contains all the necessary details right where they’re needed, and it has drag-and-drop functionality connected with RAM’s extensive database of recipes. The manager can see at a glance how the dishes work together and how they’ll be served. A sudden change from chicken to lamb is no emergency: a click to bring up the lamb dishes and the manager can drag a new option into the menu.

Details of the arrangements are available from the dashboard.

Beyond the individual events, it’s also easy to pull out particular information RAM often needs, from the newest dishes to the valet info for the upcoming week’s events.

There are lots of little extra touches in this RIA that make it fit perfectly into RAM’s workflow. The calendar screen below highlights a few.

At the upper left, you can see that it’s possible to filter the events by location. At the upper right, notice that you can print the calendar, and choose to filter what’s printed in some useful ways. These features prevent information overload and allow staff to zero in on the information they really need.

The calendar shows the current month at the top, and the following two months in thumbnails. On the lower right, the search box — like all the search boxes — gives suggestions. Type in the first few letters of a client’s name and choices pop up.

There’s a lot of information on this one screen, but since it’s been designed and arranged with the specific company’s workflow in mind, it makes the whole process easy. Even so, the Legend at the side reminds users of the color coding so the learning curve stays gentle.

While this looks like a luxurious solution –and it is — the reality is that the savings in time, reduction of errors, and increased staff and customer satisfaction give an excellent return on investment for a custom solution like this one.

A RIA may be just the solution for your business, too. Call Clevertech at (516) 869-4970 to discuss the challenges your business faces. You may find that our technology offers the perfect solution.

Permalink  |  Published in Business Strategy, Technology Tactics

David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) system is designed to bring peace of mind as well as productivity. Recently, after sharing this information with a client, I got the most interesting phone call. “Kuty,” he said, “I’m sitting on the train and something amazing is happening. My mind is at peace. I’m juggling tons of tasks, but my mind feels unburdened.”

A phenomenal benefit of this system allows you to free up your mental bandwidth and as a result handle more with less stress.

GTD step by step

1. The first essential habit is what David Allen calls “ubiquitous capture.” What does that actually mean? Grab the task as  it goes by. E-mails, letters, information, phone calls, ideas — all of it needs to be collected somewhere. Once you trust yourself to capture everything, you won’t need to waste mental energy on remembering, “I need to answer that letter” or “Where did I put the notes for that meeting?” or “I wonder whether the Cincinnati office has solved that problem with their database.”
2. The second essential habit is thinking in terms of next actions or project lists. If a task is more than one action, then it is a project and belongs on a project list. When you review all the items you captured –  file them as a project or as a next action. If an item is a project, add the next action to move that project forward.  If it’s a next action, attach a context or due date so you know where and when this task can be done. (Read more about contexts below).
3. Third, you need to ensure regular processing. If you can’t trust yourself to process all the things you capture on a routine basis, then you’ll have your urgent tasks in the back of your mind, affecting your concentration, or you’ll stop one task to deal with things that arrive, affecting your efficiency. Instead, set aside time to process everything you’ve captured. The flowchart above shows a method for GTD processing. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is this actionable?  That is, does it require action? If not, file it or toss it. If it requires action, move on to the next question.
• What’s the next action? If there’s more than one step involved, then the item is a project, and it should go to its appropriate project list. If it’s a single step, then do it if it will take less than 2 minutes, delegate it if it would be a better use of someone else’s time than yours, or add it to your to-do list or calendar if it should be done at another time.

By this time, you have nothing left but action items. You don’t want an enormous to-do list to plow through, so you’ll need to identify contexts for your actions. The context of an action is its setting. Some things need to be done at home, some at the office, some online, some by phone, and so on. Sort your action items according to their context by labeling them “@office,” “@computer,” as the requirements of the task demand. Labeling them with @ means they’ll be listed and sorted together automatically if you use electronic tools for this step.

Here’s the beauty of the context sort: next time you’re waiting somewhere, with your phone but no computer, you can check your @phone list and take those essential next actions, instead of getting stressed over having to wait. Next time you’re doing intensive work online and need a break, or have to wait for a response before continuing, you can choose an item from the @online list.

You can use web 2.0 tools to make this process accessible and practical wherever you are. Remember the Milk is a tool that we like. Here are a few of the benefits of using RTM for GTD:

• Capture, sorting, delegating, and processing can all be taken care of directly in RTM.
• RTM can be accessed from your iPhone or your Twitter account, your Android or Blackberry or your Google account, as well as from the website.
• You can rely on RTM to text or email you when a deadline or meeting is coming up, so you don’t have to keep things in the back of your mind.

RTM and GTD fit with the big picture of how we do things at Clevertech:

• Let technology improve your life.
• Work in ways that fit the way you like to work, instead of making your work habits fit the convenience of your hardware or software.
• Use smart systems to make your workflow more effective.

Recently, we’ve been working on a system that allows companies to have hundreds of people input data immediately for processing by Sage accounting systems. Instead of sending data from multiple users to a central user who then has to input that data — with multiple points along the way at which miscommunication, human error, and data loss could take place — we’ll allow ubiquitous capture and regular processing. It’s like the difference between carrying buckets from a well and having central plumbing. But a little higher tech.

In other cases, we’ve added sms texting functionality to allow access on our client’s terms, improved user interfaces to streamline the GUI experience, and created rich applications that are aesthetically pleasing. In every case, we’re making the systems work better for the people who use them.

Contact Clevertech to discuss how we can bring these principles to your company, to make life better for your staff, stakeholders, and clients.

Permalink  |  Published in Business Strategy, Technology Tactics  |  3 Comments

Web 2.0 — the interactive side of the internet — has amazing capacity for streamlining, simplifying, and even enriching your work life. The right tools and plugins can keep you on track, build accountability into your day, reduce the time you spend on repetitive tasks, and give you the benefits of organization whether it comes naturally to you or not.

Notice I said “the right tools and plugins.” You can also spend untold hours trolling the web, trying to find the best tools for your needs, figuring out how to use them, and then coping with incompatibilities. Especially if you’re the CEO or CFO rather than the CTO, the learning curve can seem too steep and the apparent complexities can drive you back to pencil and paper.

At Clevertech, we’ve discovered that a lot of our clients have this experience. We build custom software to streamline business systems, but we also see a need for individual work systems. Sometimes that means a custom solution, but often it just requires a guide through the thorny thicket of Web 2.0.

We can be that guide. Give us a call, and set up a one-on-one meeting or register for one of our group sessions. You’ll see increased productivity, reduced stress, and enhanced capacity.

It’s a great way to start the new year.

Permalink  |  Published in Uncategorized

The iPhone only makes sense for its computer-like functionality utilizing the apps that work for you. For me, it is really all about communication. That includes email via gmail, IM via trillian, basecamp, Remember The Milk and SMS.

I’ve grown used to the keyboard and can really move at a decent clip while I type. But voice is faster. And safer when I’m in the car. So I was looking for a good service and I tried out a few. This one wins in my book. Dragon Dictation allows you to click, talk and then wait a little to see it in text. While I’m sure that was the technically hard part – its the next part that shows the ingenious flexibility. You can then Send to Email, Send to Text Msg or Send to Clipboard.

The last one allows me to paste the text into any application. Now that is flexibility and worth sharing with you .

Permalink  |  Published in Technology Tactics

If you have many open tabs in firefox, and especially if you leave them open for a long time (overnight anyone?) then you have experienced memory usage of hundreds of megabytes. Personally, I’ve seen it as high as 800mb and higher.

An add-on called AFOM seems to have solved this issue. I’ve installed it and then let loose with my 20+ tabs. Worked for a while and checked my memory. It was at 130mb. Wow!

I immediately wrote this post to share it with you. Check it out yourself.

Permalink  |  Published in Technology Tactics  |  2 Comments

As the web matures,  certain common sense practices become best practices.  For example, it is common sense to realize that people have conversations around topics. Online business conversations around topics may center around a specific event or a specific transaction. Being able to compose and view messages, files and to do lists related to this topic all in one place is very powerful. In fact, we’d say it’s best practice as well as common sense, and we have been applying this best practice very successfully for our clients.

One of our clients experienced a lot of frustration with a web form of this kind, though. This client’s critical business conversation was about investments. On the website we developed, each and every investment in the portfolio  has a dashboard that allows messages, files and to-dos to be associated with the investment. We can resize graphic files and display them on the screen as well. It combines efficiency and attractiveness, keeping all the data on the topic readily visible.

Many of these graphics came from Excel, since like most financial shops this client’s is full of Excel wizards. Here was the cumbersome process to get an Excel graph into this nifty web system:

• copy the image
• paste into a program like MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop
• save the image
• upload the image

Lots of steps. Since they performed this task so often,  it became frustrating. What would be the ideal ? Copy and paste! Copy the chart in Excel and paste it into the web upload form. In the highly technical post below, we share how we conquered the security issues around sharing your local clipboard with your web browser so that a painful process became a breeze. You can also cut to the chase and go straight to the demo.

Technical Implemetation of Clipboard Copy – Web Form Paste

Years ago you could use Javascript’s object.getData() method with a data type of “Image.” You could set the object to ClipBoard, copy and paste, and browsers allowed it.

However, modern web security standards no longer allow Javascript to interact with any operating system’s clipboard. You can still override the behavior of your browser and allow clipboard access to websites, but this can leave your machine open to hacks, viruses, etc… It counts as risky behavior on the part of your machine.

What’s more, most users are not that savvy with editing browser profile policy files or advanced options. And many offices forbid overrides anyway. So that’s not really a user-friendly solution.

Where does that leave us with this request? Client-side programming still has to be the solution, but normal scripting is not a possibility. Basically, what we need to do is mimic the usual copy, paste, save and upload routine behind the scenes for the user. In my research I found two solutions:

1. Write an ActiveX control that will grab the clipboard image, create a file on the clients machine and then upload it.
2. Write a Java applet that will grab the clipboard image data, create jpeg encoded image data and send that data to a server side script for processing.

The ActiveX control required creating a file on the client’s computer. That’s a solution that could lead to more problems than it solves. Admittedly, I prefer Java anyway. So here’s how we did it…

First, we needed an applet that, when triggered, would read image data from the client’s clipboard and create a jpeg encoded image — just like most of the pictures you save on your computer.

You can download all the code for that applet at Clevertech’s Clipboard to BrowserCopy-Paste Solution.

Without having to do too much heavy lifting I was able to find open source Java code on the net that grabbed image data from the clipboard and created a jpeg encoded image. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be written for php and were sending un-encoded data streams to the server. I was writing for a ColdFusion server, and I quickly found out that ColdFusion did not like the data being sent — and promptly crashed the page. Obviously, some tweaks were needed.

In the end, I opened a connection to the server from the applet, mimicked a form-data submit with a content-type: image/jpeg and sent the image’s data base64 encoded (which ColdFusion liked). The applet then waits for a filename to be returned.

After that we needed a catch or action script on the server to process the image data and return a filename. In the code you will see “shootImage.cfm.” Basically, we get the http request data (form-data sent) and parse out the data beginning after the base64 transfer encoding tag as follows:

• Create a unique file name, since we have multiple users.
• Write the data in binary to the file.
• Finally, set a session variable with the file name created for possible future use and output the file name for the java applet to grab.

Lastly, we need a user interface page that is going to load the applet, call it on when the user hits “paste,” and display and upload the pasted image. You can see the full contents of this page in the code linked above.

There will still be security issues denying the applet access to the clipboard if the jar (the executable file) is not signed. We have included a signed jar with the code that uses Clevertech’s signature.

In the end the clients got their request and we now have a new cool little tool in our arsenal. This code has been tested and is in use by several of our clients in one form or another. Try it out yourself, if you like. If you have any issues — or don’t have the time or desire to try the do-it-yourself route — contact us, and we will help.

The key here is the Return On Investment. At Clevertech, we put ourselves in your shoes and look to maximize efficiency so that your company gets the most out of its staff resources. This tool is a great example of pushing the technology envelope to allow company staff to do more with less.

Permalink  |  Published in Uncategorized  |  4 Comments

Jason Fried from 37Signals posts about Nature being the ultimate designer.

Reading his post, I have to say that Jason sounds religious. And I agree with him completely.

Permalink  |  Published in Uncategorized