My mentor would design systems by going into a company and saying, “What’s your idea of the perfect system?”  The parallels are really uncanny compared to the way the Profit Method works and the way he envisioned creating systems for customers.  One of the things he always said was, “If a company’s going to invest in custom software, then the software should work the way the company works and not make the company change to fit the software.

We did a few projects together and then in 2000, I went out on my own.  I just kept that same method of building systems. It’s really the only way I know. But it has been a win/win situation for both my customers and me.

I know that, since then, you’ve had a number of successes with your software development efforts.  Can you enumerate some of them?

They had attempted six times to create a new application to run their entire business from receiving the order from the customer, to sending it to production control, scheduling it in the mill, starting the order and sending it on its way through all of the work centers. 

Each of the six times, they failed.  I don’t know why those projects failed, but we came in and worked directly with the president, just as prescribed in the Profit Method. 

This was a large operation, $40-$60 million in net profit. And they had a sizeable problem.

We had a rubber room meeting.  The president shared with us his vision for the company and how he wanted the information to flow.  We created the vision statement and delivered the solution as a series of prototypes.  We developed the completed solution in a year for about $50,000.00.

There were many employees saying, “You guys are gonna fail.  They never got it right in the past.  You’re not gonna make it.”  And being a consultant, I didn’t know the ins and outs of that company.  I didn’t care.  I said, “I’m here to do a job and we’re gonna get it done.”

We worked hand in hand with the president. We started with gathering customer information, and we built screens. We would build a section, go  back to the president and show it to him to determine if this is what he envisioned, and he would say, “Yes.  So, we moved on and we did that through the entire project.

As orders were created, they could send them to Production Control and queue them up, and then Production Control would schedule them for production.  And they had to manage just-in-time levels, actual inventory and casting..  They had to manage their actual inventory.  They had to manage casting.  They had their own casting facility to cast the giant coils.  This was a rolling mill so they had huge 10,000 and 12,000-pound coils of copper and bronze.

We made them do a physical inventory every single month until they balanced—actually forced them to do that.  And after about six to eight months of doing physical inventories every month, they finally balanced and their inventory was in sync with what their database said they had for inventory.