Laying the Foundation
Silver Bullet confronted three fundamental issues early on in the design of the software. Here are the challenges and the reasons why we made these strategic choices:
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Web Based or Client/Server: Our research indicated generic business processes would not be sufficient for serious, growing companies in this industry. Each freight forwarder has different requirements for reports, forms, displays, and documents. Our solution would have to easily accommodate each of these requirements. Web applications cannot do this because they are effective only for commoditized services, not highly specialized business processes. So, we discarded the notion of developing one. We chose instead to develop based on the client/server model. When customers preferred to outsource IT infrastructure, we would provide a hosting alternative with a Microsoft Certified Hosting Partner. That eliminated the need to manage servers and networks.
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Financial Control (Back office): Competitors commonly offer basic, proprietary general ledger bookkeeping in the guise of a financial accounting system. However, these “freight accounting” systems can never match the deep functionality of true ERP alternatives - nor are they “GAAP” compliant. We understood that a truly superior system must be “best in class” software for the front and back office. So, we dedicated our development efforts to business process and an optional real time, data base level integration to the world class financial management systems from Microsoft. By fixing our development focus on the complex business process of logistics providers we avoided the distraction and dilution of effort that would come from writing accounting software. After careful study, we selected the Microsoft Business Solutions platform (they offer three accounting products: Great Plains, Navision, and Axapta) for our back office and launched our logistics business software with an integration to Great Plains. Today, this unique combination is selected for its superior performance and has even been recognized by Microsoft with a Pinnacle Award. The pervasive presence of Microsoft on the business desktop and unparalleled commitment to the business market has made this alternative a rewarding experience for our customers and Silver Bullet.
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Strategic tools and utilities: Our mission is to automate core business processes for the markets we serve. Then, when needs surface for complimentary, non-strategic functionality in our systems our company will consider strategic partnerships that enable customer access to appropriate best in class technology. This has been a very effective method to offer clients automation in areas such as customs brokerage, document imaging, business analytics, and portal access to carrier interfaces. Each of these choices represents software engineering for integration that is done at the highest level of reliability by our own engineers. |
Having made these choices, Silver Bullet was able to focus on what our solutions would need to achieve for the midsize and enterprise level freight forwarder. Building with the Microsoft Platform provided an affordable and adaptable solution – one on which our customers could rely throughout their evolution.
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