Barack Obama to Stress Competitiveness, Job Creation, Deficit Reduction in Speech

Jan. 24, 2011 - PRLog -- We can all play an important role in helping with world economies even from the individual cutting back on domestic spending – managing their own economies, small businesses streamlining business applications and processes to large corporates and banking institutions investing and circulating funding once again.

As an IT and business consultant for many years, I've seen such a great waste of investment in time and money when creating and building business processes and systems which are over priced, take years (and tears) to implement and functionally land up being very bloated and unnecessary.

My speciality is working with software and dealing with medium sized companies is where I make a difference and help manage cost cutting, which always will help directly and indirectly with your local economy, and in boosting their bottom line.

The amount of unused software applications companies purchase  - which come as standard additions with hardware purchases  - but don't actually even realise they have them; the software sitting on desktops going unused which could, in effect, act as mid-balanced solutions thus avoiding heavy development (and costs) in the first place.

This is why I recommend using desktop applications (like Microsoft Access database) as a first point of reference when carrying out that all important 'feasibility' study to investigate whether  such applications can fit the requirement in the first place.

The consultancy cost for even conducting a feasibility study in the first place for a 'big' proposed system can be prohibitive and if I personally collected a dollar for each time I have seen a 150 page report of do's and don'ts only for it to be shelved or then client ending up with something that was not exactly they wanted, I could have possibly halved the deficit myself!!

So what's the answer? If you have invested in that all singing, all dancing system and realise that the output – i.e. reports are not as flexible or intuitive enough to analyse, then adding and bolting on Microsoft Access to it to act as a reporting output tool will save you further development cost for sure. In fact, this one of my main tasks when customising applications for clients who have realised their systems really lack the 'bells & whistles' of a system.

If of course you are still assessing what system will best fit that solution, take some advice from a either a specialist who can provide alternative solutions, rather than a development company whose sole agenda is to sell you a piece of heavy duty software, heavily developed to fit a 'vertical' market and not provide value to your business and save you money, or someone like myself who can give impartial advice with no extra hidden costs attached.

Remember, an application like Microsoft Access (or similar) can provide a rich set of solutions for a low cost investment, keeping the cost of ownership really down as it can be used for capturing CRM data, processing financial information and auditing, keeping track of project management processes, handling manufacturing commitments and acting as a reporting tool to other systems.

Since you have already paid for the software and licences, why not utilise this tool further and put it to good use now and will you not only do your company a real service but you can play an important part in keeping the spiralling economy under control reducing the global deficit.

# # #

Ben Beitler is a highly proficient software developer, consultant and trainer with over 17 years experience of database design and implementation of CRM, finance & bespoke applications using VBA & SQL (mainly Excel spreadsheets & Access databases).