Even using a laptop tethered to a standard mobile phone 3G connection, RapidFMS still appears to work just as fast as if you are connected to a fixed connection back at the office!
This means you can create your consignments or view statistics on the fly.
FW
Here is a quick preview of RapidFMS based on our own web-OS framework.
No more slow awkward Web Apps constrained to a single task at a time, be more productive and collaborate with your colleagues no matter where they are.
Compatible with the following clients: Windows, OSX, Linux, Android Devices, IOS Devices and can be hosted on the following servers: Windows, OSX, Linux and Android Devices. Works fine on: MSIE 8+, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari.
Don’t let the internet constrain your imagination – bring your Apps into the modern era today!
JC
reminder to myself: write a blog entry about Freddy Pickwick who is a career fruitpicker looking for a job… Freddy Pickwick applies for an Apple picking job and gives a recruitment guy, Ralph Cog a resume outlining his job history of picking Oranges, Bananas, Strawberries and Apples – Ralph Cog is baffled how Freddy can be good at all of those… When Freddy describes his experiences on how he was able to pick the different fruits efficiently and to the satisfaction of his employers, Ralph only hears static… “I started picking Apples when I was 18 years old, I ssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” . Ralph still is puzzled how Freddy knows how to pick all those types of fruit “so, you are more of an Orange picker?”…
JC
Just a follow up to my previous posting. It appears online sales has reached 1 trillion worldwide according to this article – http://www.theage.com.au/small-business/online-sales-reach-a-trillion-20130411-2hmks.html
So why not take advantage of this new market and start using our totally inexpensive My Online Store technology! Get your online store setup and within the same day you will have an evironment that you can sell your goods and services online!
Just go to myonlinestore.com.au to find out more and sign up for a completely free 7-day demo.
Regards,
FW
Hello all,
It appears there is growing evidence that traditional shopping practices are being complemented or even replaced by electronic / Internet commerce. Please refer to the following article from The Age.
“Shoppers are continuing to desert stores in droves – and it’s all due to the internet…” –
Why retailers will fail if they don’t turn to tech – theage.com.au – 5/4/2013
I still believe there are too many businesses out there who are neglecting their online presence or at least don’t understand how important having one is. They are surely losing potential customers as a result.
Times have certainly changed and your customers are no longer picking up the Yellow Pages to find local businesses in their area. They are going straight to and using Google instead.
Having a professional, attractive website is one of the most effective ways to have people remember your brand and contact you for further services. Remember that all the marketing will revolve around your website too.
So if you are a business owner yourself, please consider getting a really effective website up and running. Or if you already have one, make sure that it is up to date and looks modern.
Our Melbourne based Web Development business Web Renovators is more than happy to help you out. So please feel free to visit our website for more information http://webrenovators.com.au/
Good luck.
FW
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!).
Please visit RapidFMS’ website for more information – http://rapidfms.com.au/
Some of RapidFMS’s core features…
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
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
This month we have been flat out most of the month working on our client projects. What we have proven to ourselves is that customer service is most important and works for us. There are a lot of things that make up customer service: honesty, politeness, understanding, the ability to listen, the quality of work and actually getting it done. What has been a great incentive to continue so far, has been the constant praise we have been getting from our customers – of whom several had been burnt badly in the past and approached us with extreme caution – only to be more than happy and come back for more work or refer others to us.
I love the comment from our customer Francis Tan of 4tcleaning.com.au “All I can say is WOW! Our website looks amazing and was completed faster than expected but more importantly the level of service and communication was second to none and now it’s all completed, the after sales service is just as good. A job well done to Web Renovators”.
Thanks Francis, and I hope we can offer you great service for years to come!
JC
It’s been a hard month at work this month, our business is showing more signs of growth as we had to work on a couple of interesting web related projects. Our clients are still all happy which is a good sign – after all we aim to please.
As part of this blog, every once in a while we will add a business tip in the hope that we can provide a log of relavent information that we may one day centralise into a single location. This is because although there is a wealth of information on the net or from government offices in relation to what to do or not to do in starting a business, it is sometimes not obvious or in your face. Something you may know could be related to an industry you have come from or through the news many years ago, but even the government websites are lacking in relation to useful information for businesses – almost as though they are trying to keep a permanent work force in place rather than a country full of entrepreneurs.
Starting a business is actually quite fun, still challenging, more expensive than it needs to be if you aren’t careful and depending on the industry you are in, a lot of regulatory requirements and/or fees.
A couple of marketing strategies we have tried are print media, radio advertising and of course if you are lucky enough you may see one of us driving around our professionally skinned cars (free plug for Digital Signage Solutions, visit them at www.dss.net.au they did a fantastic job!).
What we have been in the process of recently is marketing by mailouts, door knocking and we have been considering cold calling / or fax advertising – for the latter, be sure to conform to the ACMA requirements for telemarketers for the latter (info available here: www.donotcall.gov.au). All the different marketing strategies have pros and cons, some have huge cost differences and should be done with some thought or strategy as to who your target market is and how to approach them best – something we will forever be improving on – like anything we do, it’s always good to improve over time.
JC
I was at my local computer special interest group the other day and was speaking with one of the members who owns a shop. We were catching up and he was interested in knowing what I was doing these days.
When I mentioned that I was in eCommerce and setting up online stores for other businesses he bawked and said he would never want an online store. As the night went on, I heard him mention how difficult his business was lately and it was mainly due to competition from the online space – wow I thought to myself, how can I convert this guy’s way of thinking that maybe his business wouldn’t be suffering if he too had an online store?
I know some customers will be more difficult to preach the benefits to than others, but I hope that we can help them as much as we can in not just realising the marketplace is changing – but in assisting them to make the transition and give them some confidence in doing so. Add to my roadmap – try to “sell him the benefits” of having an online store.
JC