What are the benefits of having a Software in my company?

[Naoki]

Hello,
I am new in tecnology, we use some Excel sheets but I am in doubt if we should build an IT system. It's a small company, 10 people. Our main core business is shipping commodities.
What can be the best IT system for us? What can my company improves with it?

[David Filip]

You will have many problems as your company will growth.

Pros of Excel:
+ easy to create

Cons of Excel:
- Hard to maintain big datasets
- Two people cannot work simultaneously on one sheet
- Maintaining of big tables are very hard
- can't provide support for each process in company

I recommend to transfer your agendas from Excel to some database driven IS with web interface which will run on your own network and export all of your Excel data into it. It is not needed to be very complex, you can improve it as you go and your company growth. There are tons of freelancers around the Internet to do this task.

[Dan Murphy]

"What can be the best IT system for us?" Is a very general question.

In order to figure out what you need you have to identify what you can be doing better. If you have a bottleneck in your shipping process because of the excessive use of paper files then you buy/build a system that could automate that process. If you want to have better tools used for reporting then you follow David's advice and move your data to database that has a web based interface and you buy/build your reporting tool.

There are a bunch of systems out there that could address the need of any shipping company but you have to find or build the right one for you.

[Arthur Koenig]

Just joined the group and saw your post. We were one of those companies too and we used a lot of paper forms and Excel to collect and process our small firm data. Our activity consisted of testing of soil samples for engineering construction projects. (Think of a soil sample like a product that has to be inventoried, weighed, packed and. postage applied, and then shipped.)

We made a software platform to get us (5 guys and a cat ) around the headache we were starting to have. We started simple with just Excel, which you are doing now, then we started to our own coded application using VB and a MS Access Database.


Here is a link to our particular software so you can see a little more AND to see that you are not alone. Yours application would be different, but I think you will get the idea. Not sure you need an IT department.

Couple Points:
First point is that it does NOT have to be all fancy and cool to get good results. If it is a solid tool that helps then that is what you want.

Second point is that we did not go with all the latest and greatest. We use MS Access and VB regardless of all the protestation one week that we should be using CoffeeBeanII and then the next week using Caffeine++ Sure when we scale up we will go .net and change database type, but that comes later.

Third - Keep things as simple as you can until you have to step up into the next level. Each level will require some tear down and re-learning, and cost that will have to be eaten, and you should consider each of your software initiatives (enve an IT iniative) kind of like remodeling your house. Do not bite off more than you can chew and do not remodel because of resale, remodel because it is something you need to have .. to bring money into your business. At 10 people I suspect you do not need some big IT Department. At that level of staff, even calling it an internal IT department sounds like you are aiming to high. (If you were a software company then maybe that would be different - or a doctors office etc that would be different.)

There are many more and I am sure there will be other advice here. These are just my points that i have found, as the guy writing the checks, to be important.

[keith fer]

software can do your job easily and efficiently and its better if you are supposed to do the same task repeatably, it depends on your company type and on your income

Keith

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