Biz Update
Business is proceeding nicely. Sales of the ice cream maker are outstripping our ability to bring them in from overseas. We'll sell twice as many in the next six months as the company sold in the last twelve months. And I think we're still just getting started.
We continue to implement processes we've had in work for a long time. There are less than 15 of the 54 huge carts we started with. We've almost entirely replaced them with 25 more functional carts that take up half the floor space.
We printed our first UPS labels on our new label printer (dedicated to UPS) yesterday. Very exciting and a big improvement over the paper process.
I've finally got some shelves on the wall in my office. Much needed!
We've moved two customers from paper processes over to electronic web-based EDI (electronic data interchange). It's not a lot better for us, but it will be next year, because...
I've started the investigation into professional accounting systems. We're using a $299 off-the-shelf program called MYOB. It's somewhat buggy, counter-intuitive, slow, and generally clunky. I want to move to a higher-end system as of January 1, 2006. The good systems should not only be faster and more powerful, but they should directly interface with the EDI system we're using. That will eliminate many manual paper-based error-prone steps we currently take in our existing processes. There are another dozen or so customers that we could move to EDI if we had a better accounting system.
On the 19th, Steve and I head for Europe. We're going to the European Outdoor Retailers Show. We'd like to expand the export side of our business so this is a big step in the right direction. We already have distributors in Britain, Scandanavia, Germany, and elsewhere, but it's a big market and we're under-represented.
We continue to implement processes we've had in work for a long time. There are less than 15 of the 54 huge carts we started with. We've almost entirely replaced them with 25 more functional carts that take up half the floor space.
We printed our first UPS labels on our new label printer (dedicated to UPS) yesterday. Very exciting and a big improvement over the paper process.
I've finally got some shelves on the wall in my office. Much needed!
We've moved two customers from paper processes over to electronic web-based EDI (electronic data interchange). It's not a lot better for us, but it will be next year, because...
I've started the investigation into professional accounting systems. We're using a $299 off-the-shelf program called MYOB. It's somewhat buggy, counter-intuitive, slow, and generally clunky. I want to move to a higher-end system as of January 1, 2006. The good systems should not only be faster and more powerful, but they should directly interface with the EDI system we're using. That will eliminate many manual paper-based error-prone steps we currently take in our existing processes. There are another dozen or so customers that we could move to EDI if we had a better accounting system.
On the 19th, Steve and I head for Europe. We're going to the European Outdoor Retailers Show. We'd like to expand the export side of our business so this is a big step in the right direction. We already have distributors in Britain, Scandanavia, Germany, and elsewhere, but it's a big market and we're under-represented.
posted by Keith @ 7:42 PM
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