We are in the business of providing mobile applications to IT managers of SMB in the Supply Chain industry : distribution companies, warehouses, …. Usually the IT Manager is so busy giving the right tools and support to his administration staff and to his force on the field, that he becomes captive of a specific way of work, both on paper and on computers, whether he created this specific way or he inherited it from his predecessors.
He is very asking of software to help him, but any software he wants, he wants it to be very adapted to his exact current way of work, no less no more.
The point is that by doing this, the IT manager is putting himself in a situation where progress and change will be difficult in the future. All the best practices set by the industry will not have the chance to reach him and his company if he is focusing only in his own working way that he and his predecessors have built over the years and that still sometimes carries some non-movable flaws.
Instead, by using a software used by others, he is taking advantage implicitly of best practices and ways of work implemented and used elsewhere, and he can leverage this to spread new improvements into his company.
Unfortunately it happens still that a vendor tends to please the customer at any cost, even if it is not for his own good. Once one integration company we worked with, made a pressure on us just to make a quick hack to MS5 to implement a behavior the customer was making a focus on, even if the customer did not think well about it, and even if this quickmodification would create a risk of holes elsewhere.
At Mug In Motion (Mughamrat), our systematic process is whatever new feature implemented from the feedback provided from one customer should be able to profit to all the other customer without disturbing they actual process. The same application MS5 with the same release is used by poultry companies, mobile telephone distributors, and restaurant chain suppliers.
Better ways, and new options are always welcome. And as we add them, we make sure that they serve everybody, old and new customers. How ? Instead of hard customization for one customer, we follows carefully and surely a roadmap fed by all. Anytime an upgrade is ready (a minimum of 5 releases by quarter), we provided it free to our customers. It is seamless to install, and does not change the process, only adds options to it, that the IT manager can enable or disable.
