Business leaders, consultants, and entrepreneurial coaches have said over and over again – don’t be everything to everyone. Looking back, certainly, that is great advice. But it was advice that I couldn’t adhere to.
I didn’t pave a new path for Collective Data because I thought we were smarter or better than the experience of these successful advisers. Instead, I didn’t align with that age old adage because I was on a different mission. I wanted to take the theory that technology could be built that would allow an application to do everything for everyone (within reason, of course). Since Collective Data already had a product serving the fleet management industry and we got numerous requests for customizations to our first fleet maintenance software system, it seemed like a good fit. Good or bad, that was the course we set out on back in early 2000.
The Result
I think it is fair to say… we went down the right path. Our experience shows that although there are many common features on how fleets typically operate, the majority of medium to larger organizations have policies and processes in place that are unique to them. There’s a huge need for fleet and asset management software to help improve their existing processes and make everyone in the organization more productive.
For example, when a client needs our software to track employee time off requests and manage an approval process, we ask how that process should work. And we deliver that. When a client needs Work Orders with certain repair types or dollar values to be automatically set to “Needs Review” when all work is completed so a foreman can verify accuracy before closing out… we promptly setup the software to do so.
It’s Not Custom Software With Us. It’s a Configuration.
Traditionally, changes like the ones mentioned above to software is a matter of creating more software. And often, you’d have to wait for the next version to come out before you get the new features. But now, for us, adding things like this is just a configuration to our fleet and asset management system. Something we do everyday. And something that doesn’t keep our clients from getting version updates when available. We have a system that manages each application so all our clients can stay current as we release new features, but still have the independent flexibility that they now demand of our software. Because they can. Because it is what we do.