As far as them adding bells and whistles, the problem is that they add them on thier terms, not your needs.
Donald,
Back in early '83 I went into business with a couple of partners. Mostly in the early '80's the forwarding business was run with a typewriter and telex machine, not computers, but the computer age was dawning. My operating partner and I both came from a company that had already seen the future and was developing their own packing program to track purchase orders, receive freight and pack it, then produce packing lists and shipping documents.
When we started our company, John and I wanted something along the same lines, so we hired a young programmer to help us. We gave him a whole list of parameters that we needed and what we wanted the program to do, approximately what we wanted the documents to look like and such. Every week he would come in with a new "cool" idea for the program that he thought was just what we needed... we would explain we didn't want that, it doesn't serve any purpose for use, it didn't provide information our customers wanted or needed. He would then stick it into the program and try to sell us that it was just the thing.... never mind that it didn't work or wasn't needed, or wanted...
Later when I was involved with the purchase of other computer programs as other companies, we would get all of these "bells and whistles" in the programs... nothing really worked as proposed, few of the things didn't work at all ("they were in "beta" and would have the bugs edited out before the programs was released")... some of the ideas required twice the amount of time and effort to produce a documents than to just type or fill in blocks.. we would have "databases" of info that we could "automatically" fill in shipper's names and addresses, destinations, consignees name and address, rates, etc.... things that most often changed each time a new shipment was generated. These people would actually get offended if you wanted to take some function out that they thought was the cat's meow... Often times, the steps involved in accessing these "databases" were complex and involved and took longer than just typing the information into the form.
When TWA first went computerized in 1974-75 they bought a 'canned' cargo program from Alitalia airlines... the initial set up required multiple sign-in / sign-out's to do a single airway bill...
1. Sign-in to open the awb - enter the awb number. / sign out
2. sign-in - add the shipper name and address / sign out
3. sign-in - add the consignee and destination / sign out
3. sign-in - add the pieces and weights, rate categories, commodities and rates / sign out
4. sign-in - route the waybill - move it to outbound manifest / sign out
5. sign-in - dispatch the shipment - electronically to destination / sign out
6. sign-in at destination - receive the manifest inbound from origin station / sign out
7. sign-in - locate freight in warehouse / sign out
etc etc.... this is not much of an exageration... it took forever to work a single awb before they finally got some of the work re-programmed. Some of these functions still were no finished when I left the airlines in Aug of '76.
Before the computer, I could take an awb, roll it into a typewriter, fill it out, rate it, manifest it, put the manifest on a flight in 10 minutes.
As Art Buckholtz once said, "computers makes it easier to do some things, but problem is some the things don't need to be done"
BTW, I love computers... they are fun and I enjoy the access they afford to the world. I just wish I had taken the time to learn more about them.
Just don't ask me how I know that. :frown::frown:
