Sometimes we are truly blessed;

We sometimes work long hours and people come to us when they need our help, at the end of the day, we live for that moment where the situation that is causing our client grief is resolved and that feeling of satisfaction is second to non.

We continually look for Arrow software clients, and recently we have had a few new clients come on board, who shall we say, have had challenging times. It’s amazing what people live with.

As all Arrow software clients would be aware, the main printing application for documents in Arrow is a product called Quickforms, now let me say before I go any further, we believe this is a fantastic product and provides great flexibility, it also provides us with the ability to deliver a solution that clients want and need… But as with all things in life, these tools only work effectively when installed and configured correctly.

EBS have the largest deployment of Quickforms in the world, with the product servicing 150 machine across all states of Australia, not to say all are used at once, but the fact remains; we have this application running without any problems across a network of 150 machines and guess what?.. We never receive one phone call from this client in regards to printing issues.

Now back to our recent experiences, when we receive a call from an existing Arrow Software client who was looking to EBS to help them, we have a process that we like to follow, we like to do an ERP health check for prospective clients; this is a process where we look at the data and basically look for any incumbent problems, it becomes a project plan for work that is required to get the client up to our standard. We feel all clients should be able to get the beast out of their Arrow software system, so it is very important for us to make sure we get them on track. We also look at the network configuration and any SQL server configuration issues. We have two certified MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialists) on staff, which is a Microsoft SQL server certification, basically we know what we are doing as any of our current clients would attest.

We often find one of the biggest issues on these client sites is Quickforms, why… as I said, we think it is one of the best tools in the suite, the answer is simple; it shouldn’t be!

We were once asked to take over a site who had many problems, one of which was Quickforms. This site had some interesting problems, depending on who printed an invoice for example; would depend on what the invoice looked like, now this was not by design, the idea was the same invoice printed from every machine (as you would expect in most cases) but for this site it was not the case, by the time we took over this site they were tearing their hair out with Quickforms. We identified this as a priority and the first visit we made to the site we set out to correct the Quickforms issues. We were there for about 4 hours in this case and all the problems were resolved, it embarrasses me to say that the client had been dealing with the problem of “Quickforms” for 9 months prior to EBS taking over the site and fixing it in one afternoon.

So, you must be asking now, why did it only take EBS 4 hours to fix a problem that was ongoing prior to EBS for 9 months? My answer to this is simple, we have a standard methodology when it comes to Quickforms (for that matter, we have a methodology for all things), but what we did in this case was just remove all of the setup that the prior partner had performed and started again. A fresh install using the EBS method and a quick polish of the forms design and the site was back on track.

If the product is install incorrectly the first time, no matter how many times you try to “fix it”, you may never get there, I think this may have been the case in the above situation. We also understand that people have different skill sets and not all shoes fit the same foot. All I can say is if you have Quickforms problems you don’t have to have them.

Another site we recently took over had Quickforms working… in a fashion, but were unable to email documents via Quickforms. Again this can be a common problem with non EBS clients. In this case we basically took the same approach; although Quickforms was working (well as I said in a fashion) we didn’t feel it was the most effective way for it to be “working” so we reinstalled it, configured it the EBS way and setup Quickforms emailing. I’m not sure how many years the client has had Arrow for, I would guess between 8 and 10 years; but for the first time after our first site visit they were able to email Arrow documents via Quickforms… Back to my original line, we are truly blessed; the satisfaction of providing a solid resolution to our clients is why we get out of bed in the morning.