Over the past few months we've been working on a number of exciting new features for WorkflowMax.  One of these features nearing completion is a Custom Report Builder.

Using the Report Builder you will be able to create:

• one off reports
• custom data exports
• custom management reports
• custom data views, for example your own Job Manager or Timesheet views
• custom search screens using criteria specific to your business and data

• Client & Contact
• Current Job
• Invoice
• Invoice Cost
• Invoice Task
• Job
• Job Allocation
• Job Cost
• Job Document
• Job Note
• Job Task
• Job Task Allocation
• Milestone
• Purchase Order
• Purchase Order Cost
• Purchase Receipt
• Quote
• Quote Cost
• Quote Task
• Supplier & Contact
• Time

On Friday 6th November 2009 BlueBerryIT won the Emerging Business Award at the Westpac Nelson Tasman Chamber of Commerce 2009 Business Awards. 

BlueberryIT have been using WorkflowMax for over a year now. We have a close working relationship with team who are in a great position to provide service and training to our customer base in the Nelson region. We are thrilled to see them doing so well.

Well done to the whole team, it is a great result and I am sure that Nelson is happy to have you providing such a great service to the region. 

Smoothpay have just completed an elegant timesheet integration with WorkflowMax using our API. Timesheet entries created in WorkflowMax can be imported directly into Smoothpay saving on timesheet data re-entry.

Both Mac and PC compatible Smoothpay/Gold also provides direct integration with MoneyWorks accounting products.

Smoothpay/Gold payroll is freshly designed from the ground up, to make the task of managing staff and in-house payroll processing easy for New Zealand, Australian and Singaporean companies - check out their website.

We are super excited to be visiting the Hawkes Bay next week as part of an event being organised by The Fruitbowl http://www.fruitbowl.co.nz/technology/how-workflowmax-and-xero-can-help-your-business/. The Fruitbowl are a group of local businesses who have come together to share their stories and build a community to encourage business opportunities and attract people back to one of the most beautiful spots in the country.

We will be presenting the benefits of WorkflowMax alongside Xero and SmartPayroll to a range of small to mid-sized firms who I gather are just as excited to see us as we are them. WorkflowMax has developed a great following in the region and it will be a fantastic excuse for us to fly down to Napier and visit as many customers as we can. I can't wait!

An email I received recently from a customer in Madagascar brought home to me the power of online computing. Apart from the obvious benefits of accessibility and security from theft or damage, I'm not sure I ever envisaged online computing playing a part in a coup d'état:

"Interestingly the mob have ransacked town today and been tear gassed. They are targeting the French and we are in a French building ... All the more reason for your system to be used by companies like ours" Matthew Ffooks, Madagascar, September 12, 2009 

A story aired last night on Campbell Live focusing on how Twitter assisted Orcon to solve a customer help desk crises. The bare bones of the story is that a young woman called Orcon's helpdesk and was put on hold. Getting bored of listening to the dulcet tones of Sinatra crooning in her ear, she decided to tweet to the world about the length of time she was on hold.

15 mins and waiting .....

20 mins and still nothing .....

25 mins and Frank is really burning my ear off ...

Low and behold someone at Orcon was actually doing some work and picked up on the negative conversation evolving in twitterspace. He quickly responded and the customer issue was resolved. The story painted a gloriously successful picture of how Twitter is being used around the globe to resolve customer support issues. Three cheers for Twitter!!

Don't get me wrong Twitter is fantastic for this purpose. We put it to good use ourselves. But the angle of this story for me was all wrong. This isn't a story about Twitter success, it is a story about the abject failure of Orcon's existing support services. Trumpeted as the peoples internet provider, their underlying philosophy is based on high end customer service. Customers choose to stay with Orcon because of their service levels.

With such a strong focus on service, how is it that a customer was kept waiting as long as they were? If they have a support number for customers to call then surely this is being manned? If I was Orcon I'd be seriously taking a look at my existing support systems and trying to understand what went wrong. Because this isn't a success story. This is a story about how Twitter saved their bacon. 

One of the difficult aspects of managing a large job or project is ensuring everything remains in context.  Not only for you as the project manager but also for the benefit of the staff working on the job.

As the information on the job grows, especially the number of tasks, milestones, notes, documents and costs it becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain visibility between relevant items.  In the end you end up with a lot of information on the job, but in order to find anything you can easily get lost in the detail. 

Late in 2008 we introduced a concept of Note and Document Folders to a job.  This allows you to group all common notes and documents together placing them in context.  For example, Images, Emails, Contracts etc.  Using the example below, clicking on "Images" would list all the notes from the images folder.

In the upcoming release this weekend we've extended the Folder concept to apply to the entire job.  In addition to notes and documents - tasks, milestones and costs can now be grouped into folders.  This allows you to visually break a job up into multipe components or sub jobs allowing you to gain increased visibility on each individual stage or component without the unnecessary noise from the other elements of job.

Clicking on a folder will display all the tasks, milestones, notes, documents and costs specific to that folder. 

Furthermore, you can quickly and easily create purchase orders and invoices for each Folder seperately from the remainder of the job allowing you to more easily manage your costs and income associated with each part of the job.

Back in 1995 when Team New Zealand won the America's Cup their campaign was focused on a single value - "Does it make the boat go faster?".  Before undertaking any activity they would ask this simple question.  If the answer was no, it wasn't worth doing.

At WorkflowMax, we've adopted this value along with our core focus of building job management software that is simple and easy to use.

As the WorkflowMax service has grown we've started to notice some performance bottle necks with our original architecture of the application.  A couple of months ago we decided to undertake a project to focus on improving the general performance of WorkflowMax.

Before you can improve the performance though, you first need a benchmark to compare against.  As part of our standard application monitoring, we log the execution time for every page request made to WorkflowMax.  This allows us to easily identify the requests which take a long time to execute as well as determine metrics such as average page execution time.  

The requests taking a long time to execute are generally easy to fix.  Most often it's a case of optimising the database query or tweaking the application logic.  The good thing with these types of performance issues is you can measure these against the benchmark and any performance improvements are obvious.  Thankfully there were not too many of these issues in WorkflowMax and we've managed to resolve most of them.  We do feel there is still room for further improvement which we will continue to review over the upcoming months.

Reducing the average page execution time though required further analysis of what was happening inside the application during each page request.  By enabling query logging on the database in our development environment we were able to identify several common database queries which executed for every page request.  These requests returned the same result each time indicating they were prime candidates to be stored in a cache. Some examples of these queries include determining user permissions and which application modules are enabled for a users account.  By introducing Memcached as our caching tier, we were able to reduce the number of queries to the database per page request and thus reduce the loading on the database itself.  

Over the past several weeks we've incrementally grown our caching tier to a point where combined with our other performance improvements, we've reduced the average page execution time from 190 milliseconds down to 105 milliseconds.  This is a significant performance gain that has allowed us to process more requests per second which utlimately leads to faster page generation and through put on our servers. 

Having a benchmark as a reference point has enabled us to measure which changes have or haven't resulted in a performance improvement.  By releasing these improvements incrementally to production over several weeks we've been able to measure which changes had more of an impact than others giving us valuable knowledge which we can apply to our future development strategy and design.  The really pleasing aspect to all this is that the performance improvements have occured at the same time the number of people using WorkflowMax has increased.

Going forward, in addition to delivering new functionality for our users, we'll be devoting time to each release to ensure the boat continues to get faster and doesn't get becalmed in the water.

One of the most important assets to your business is your brand.  Communicating your brand, whether it be on your web site, via marketing material, newsletters, business cards, and trade shows are all means for your business to create awareness and to communicate with existing and potential customers.  It is therefore vital, that all external communication from your Job Management system to your customers and/or suppliers reflects your brand.

WorkflowMax's templating engine allows us to build custom templates so your invoices, quotes, purchase orders and job briefs, communicate your brand using your design.  

Below are several examples of templates we've built for our customers. 

If you are interested in having us build custom templates for your business, please contact us to discuss your requirements and pricing.

The development team has been busy over the past month implementing some fantastic enhancements to WorkflowMax.  Below are a few of the key feature requests we've implemented.

Part Payments

Part payments can now be recorded against invoices generated in WorkflowMax.  Further more, if you're using Xero or KashFlow as your accounting system, WorkflowMax can import all payments (part of full) eliminating double entry.

Custom Client Rates

If you have a custom rate you charge specific customers, you can now set this up on a per client basis.

New Cost Search

We've implemented a new cost search which includes the supplier name, product code and purchase price.  This is particulary useful for our trade and manufacturing customers who purchase product from a number of different suppliers.