Software Development using Tools you already have
Software design for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) involves creating custom, cost-effective solutions to improve efficiency, automate tasks, and manage customer relationships, often utilizing low-code platforms for rapid development and considering the specific constraints of limited budgets and resources. Key approaches include developing bespoke applications for unique challenges, using off-the-shelf or SaaS solutions for simpler needs, and employing agile methodologies to deliver value quickly. Important considerations for SME software design are tailoring features to business goals, ensuring scalability, and maintaining a balance between custom development and standardized tools to optimize for budget and time.
Microsoft Office is a wonderful product and most companies use it as their main tool set to control processes that allow their company to run across all their employees.
The only problem is that whilst the tools are great, the ability to integrate information across the workforce is not really there and there is also the opportunity to make mistakes due to incorrect transfer of data from one application to another.
Below is a typical scenario that we have encountered many times before and in every case we have been able to rationalize the processes into a single application without having purchase new software.
Current Scenario
Below is a typical scenario in a small to medium size business of maybe 5 to 20 employees.
Each person has their own workstation connected to a central server for file storage and everyone uses the normal tools to manage the office processes.
So lets take a business that has customers, provides quotations, takes orders and processes those orders and eventually invoices them. The orders might be goods bought in from other suppliers or they may be your own manufacturing process.
As the business has grown over the years various spreadsheets have been developed to keep track of all these processes. It might be one spreadsheet with multiple workbook and someone has been clever enough to write background coding or macros to take data from one workbook to a summary sheet.
The above is reasonably manageable until the company grows and then spreadsheets have to be shared between staff doing the same job. Yes, they are on a central server but very often a worksheet is opened on someone else’s computer and they have forgotten to close it and it cant be opened for editing on yours. The temporary solution is possibly to take a copy of the workbook and intend to update the real one later. An alternative scenario is that someone will take a copy of a spreadsheet and add their own functionality because it suits their job better. That copy is maybe only saved to their computer……. and then that employee leaves the business and we may have a disaster.
Very soon we are in a situation where fragmented information is spread around the office and is out of control.
Possible Future for you (our solution)
The logical solution to the problem is to create a central database which stores information in a logical way and presents that information to all employees using a common interface written specifically to run your business. This means you are controlling how your employees manage your processes.
A record in a database table is nothing more than the information contained in a single line of a spreadsheet but it has the advantage of being “related” to other functions within the business. So the details on the quotation are common to the order placed by the customer and the workflow through the factory producing the goods. The frontend can keep track of the various stages of the manufacturing process and flag deadline issues.
When it come to invoicing the customer, the Access system can produce invoice reports which are simply bottom line values which are transferred to your accounting system. The Access frontend can even automatically send an email to the customer enclosing the invoice report using a specific email address (sales@….) and also write today’s invoice data to a CSV file for importing into your accounting system.
If your company is multi-site we would create a backend database in the cloud which would be Microsoft’s renowned SQL server. Apart from making your data accessible from anywhere in the world, the data is totally secure. The database could be kept locally on a single site and may even use Access’s own database structure.
