Introducing RapidFMS – “The Future of Freight Management”

 All, Business, Technology  Comments Off on Introducing RapidFMS – “The Future of Freight Management”
Mar 262013
 

We are now in the process of promoting our wonderful RapidFMS product to Australian businesses, carriers and freight brokers.

We ask all interested clients and investors to help us make RapidFMS the leading Freight Management System in Australia (and even the world if there is enough interest!).

Multi Document Interface (MDI)

Please visit RapidFMS’ website for more information – http://rapidfms.com.au/

Some of RapidFMS’s core features…

  • Consignment Entry & Manifesting
  • Thermal printing of labels with barcodes
  • International language support
  • Works on all modern OS’s & web browsers
  • Custom widgets i.e. maps, graphs & more
  • Tailored, custom developed solutions for you

Security:

Unlike many other systems on the market, security for RapidFMS was not an afterthought. RapidFMS was designed from the start with a full security approach in mind to consider things such as system exploitation and data security.

Tracking:

RapidFMS can provide your customers with the ability to track their freight* from anywhere, provide them a means to view system events and even subscribe to them so they are notified when key events occur.

Rating:

Let your customers find out from RapidFMS what the cost of consignments are from their Carriers and let them decide who to use based on factors such as location, service types and size of delivery. Let them view their costs over time with RapidFMS’s charting system.

Collaboration:

In the modern World with businesses wanting to share data between employees and even remote office locations, RapidFMS allows you to enter and view data as a group, collaborating to help have your freight data entered ready and labeled before the truck arrives.

Charting:

Charting is available within RapidFMS to provide you with a rich and concise means to view and analyse statistics and KPIs. Charting requirements can be customised to your business needs now and as your business grows.

Mobility:

No modern freight system would be complete without some type of support for mobile devices. RapidFMS excels in this area providing a full set of rich functionality right from your device over a 3G network or Wi-Fi connection.

Printing:

As printing is such an important part of Freight Management we designed the system with flexibility and speed being priorities. You can print fast and accurately to anywhere in the World, to a printer** connected to the Internet, whether you are using a desktop PC or a mobile device such as a smart phone or tablet. Print to a networked label printer from your Android tablet or iPad.

e-Trade:

Trade electronically with your customers and business partners, have custom interfaces developed to integrate your own in-house systems and more.

Unique Multiple Document Interface (MDI):

RapidFMS gives you a rich and unique environment that allows you to work with multiple documents at once. It definitely sets a new benchmark in usability and design.

Mobile Device Compatibility:

Enter consignments & print labels on the run. RapidFMS is compatible with modern mobile devices such as mobile phones & tablets including iPhone and iPad.

Centralised Data Store:

Have your employees access RapidFMS from anywhere in the world. Let us host the solution for you or you can choose to have it installed within your very own premisis.

Custom Features and Development:

Are you looking for a specific solution or feature? Let us develop that for you. RapidFMS is powered by people with over 50 years Freight Industry experience!

 

Regards,

FW & JC

Close-Minded Contract Agents

 All, Rants  Comments Off on Close-Minded Contract Agents
Mar 232013
 

We are unsure why it is so, but *some* contract Agencies and their employees have a very limited view of the World and have sand-boxed their small minds into thinking that people cannot be good at more than one task – perhaps they themselves are only good at one thing? LOL

What they need to realise is that when you run a small to medium business it can be a godsend to be able to learn and know more than one thing, not because you want to work on everything, but sometimes it is a necessity due to budget reasons. If you are not one of those Agencies, feel free to give us a call.

What a typical 70 hour work week consists of for ‘each of us’ at the moment:

– Make initial contact with potential customers based on leads and discuss with them their very high level layman requirements in order to ensure that we are able to help them or not. If we believe we can help them we then arrange if necessary a meeting in order to meet them and discuss their high-level requirements and try to convert them into customers or likely customers (some of our products are sales of established products and some are new developments so the initial contact can be quite different depending on what it is).

– Perform some BA work in relation to customers for which we have converted and/or almost converted – sometimes it is pre-work, but other times just further clarifications or requirements gathering – depending on the state of the product or work, demonstrate it in person to show them the progress as well as clarify certain complicated aspects that may require clarification.

– Analyse, design and develop the products depending on which product we have to constantly switch between html/css/javascript/java (front end – java for the applets) to php/python/c#/java (backend) to vb6/java (desktop or android apps) to objective c (iPhone apps) not to mention the different SQL backends.  Some products use almost all the mentioned technologies – does anyone these days develop using a single technology?  I doubt it!  (Agents take note).

– Provide customer support and training.

– Schedule and manage after hours product releases with clients as well as system upgrades where necessary.

– Project manage the small team we have which includes ourselves – we are a very agile company but depending on the budgets for particular jobs we may be more or less formal in our approach.  All our jobs we manage to some degree of formality in that we track requirements/stories, we have our goals/scrums, we have our r&d/spikes and we have our standups/emails (when we are not in the office).  We are always on top of things.

– Design and prepare advertising material and it’s copy as well as attend promotional shows when we can.

– Payroll and Accounts, this is the less fun part but we have to do it and we know how to do it – properly!

We don’t all have the exact same knowledge of everything or the same level of knowledge of everything but we have a very solid cross over and we are forever increasing our knowledge in all areas.

If you ever get asked by an Agent why you know more than one thing or how you can be good at more than one thing – ask them if they only know one thing and why they only know one thing!  IT started as our hobby decades ago, still is our hobby today, but not only that… for decades we have worked in the industry at business sizes ranging from small to corporate as well as running our own – successfully!

JC & FW