Making a Food Market Vendor Consortium
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@scottalanmiller said in Aging scanners, Windows CE, ActiveSync w/ Windows Server 2003, or Android:
@nerdydad said in Aging scanners, Windows CE, ActiveSync w/ Windows Server 2003, or Android:
Aspen Systems out of Pheonix, AZ
https://www.aspen-systems.com/Canopy is the system
https://www.aspen-systems.com/canopy-overviewWant to get a consortium together to get this stuff replaced with something good and modern?
Might want to fork it here. I'm not too familiar with consortiums. I know that they exist but wouldn't know the first place to start on getting one together.
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So now, it's about going to management and asking them to look into making a consortium (I assume this would be another company) that would invite other companies in the same vertical space as you, to all chip in and hire programmers to make a better product for your companies, and possibly to sell to even more companies.
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How it generally works is you get the owners involved, they get several (five, ten, one hundred) of their frenemies (competors that they are on good terms with) to get together and jointly find a way to sponsor projects that benefit them as a whole. Some things you want to keep to yourself because you want to beat the others in your market, but some things make sense to share and simply improve your overall efficiency. Working together can be higher profits for everyone, without benefiting one player over the others. That's where a consortium makes sense.
Get a bunch of companies with similar ERP needs together, and a single software vendor could work to make a product that is really well suited to meeting their joint needs. It's a great way to break the outside "one vendor" extortion problem.
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@dashrender said in Making a Food Market Vendor Consortium:
So now, it's about going to management and asking them to look into making a consortium (I assume this would be another company) that would invite other companies in the same vertical space as you, to all chip in and hire programmers to make a better product for your companies, and possibly to sell to even more companies.
A consortium woud only get them together. Making their own software as a consortium would be problematic because they'd need the internal expertise to do that, and presumably if any of them had that, they'd do this alone and blow the others out of the water.
To do this in any practical way, you need an outside player that is a software vendor that is willing to also invest to make this happen and isn't a direct competitor with anyone in the consortium. Someone that has the horizontal expertise, while the consortium provides the vertical expertise.
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This is something that @Bundy-Associates does.
We have a software package that does inventory, costing, general ledger, etc. It was designed and built for the manufacturing industry.
Unfortunately it is outdated IMO and needs modernized into a SaaS product.
It is fully functional, but it was designed on the old school Client-Server model with a local SQL Server database. Nothing wrong with that when it was designed. It was the norm then. It is updated and current with technology (runs on Server 2016, SQL 2017, with .NET 4.5 i need to update that to 4.7 one of these days).
It is just outdated in design philosophy.
It is a goal for our company, but we do not have the funds to redesign and we do not want to take on the debt to do so at this time.
