We love our clients. They are award winning, successful, and great to work with. Simcro is a good example. They have a great team, led by Will Rouse, that export worldwide and consistently win awards for their R & D. The company currently exports over 90 percent of its products to more than 65 countries. In the last year they have either won or been a finalist in four national and international awards. To read more, look at the following articles from: Scope, Bayer Innovations and IF Product Design Awards 2010.
Business planning, from my experience, is something we all want to do better! There are always shortcuts, simplified spread sheets, and the proverbial back of the envelope calculations to fall back on. However, when your business is growing, and you really want to have fact-based decision making, you really want to have great advisors and great systems in behind you.
We have always been fortunate to have great advisors (more about that in another blog), but our accounting systems have always lagged behind – never so much so that the wheels came off, they just lacked polish to them and involved a lot of manual report creation.
One of the tools which I have recently found to help is a product called Cashflowwizard from Decision Curve. It saved time, was really able to help with forecasting, and had the flexibility to be able to adapt to our business. Based on an Excel model, it is both intuitive and really quite logical in its approach – have a look at the video tour.
You will want to run it on a PC or Laptop with a good spec as it is quite demanding on processor power. We ran into issues running it on Windows 7 x64, so we would recommend Windows 7 32bit and Office 2007.
We have found a huge benefit in having a virtualisation environment with the firewall development process. Previously it was a lot more labour intensive in terms of burning ISO images of builds, testing the CD burned, and running up the install on physical hardware.
With a virtual environment, we can eliminate the time consuming “rinse and repeat” process of constantly reburning a CD image and installing it, by directly mounting the image to a virtual machine, and testing the install. This reduces one part of the development process from nearly two weeks of work to two days – a massive saving, especially when R & D resources are always scarce.
Any process that can save that amount of time fits really well with two things we are very keen on at IT Partners – productivity, and using tools from Lean Manufacturing within professional service firms.
Right now we are making further investment in internal systems, resources, and relationships – if you think you have something to offer, talk to us!