Case Studies
The following are anecdotal accounts of customers that have used tools produced by the team that is building the SIMPOL product line. Some of these are using SIMPOL in some fashion, others are not yet using SIMPOL, but are planning to, but are using the earlier tool set based on Superbase, the last five versions of which were also produced by the current SIMPOL development team. The objective is to show what kind of people use these types of tools, and what they manage to achieve with them. At a later stage there will be proper case studies discussing the issues encountered while building applications in SIMPOL, or while converting applications to SIMPOL.
UK Internal Corporate Solution, Health Care Sector
Dr. G is a trained medical doctor who at one time worked in private practice. He started designing software for a business idea that he had, by using Superbase (the predecessor to SIMPOL). That business was an agency software for connecting doctors with jobs. The software completely supports the needs of the business and although not written perfectly, was of sufficient quality that he managed to successfully sell the company to a buyer within 3 years of its creation. That company was a medium-sized player in the health services arena. Within another year and a half, the company was resold to an even larger player, a multinational company. After doing an internal review, the multinational company hired an independent consultancy to evaluate the software package and it use within the business. The consultancy determined that the software was absolutely fit for purpose, and in fact was integral to the profitability and success of that company. Since the original software was never designed to handle the number of users the company planned to add to its staff to cope with the anticipated growth, the consultancy contacted Simpol Limited to have us help them assess the state and scalability of the software. Simpol Limited was subsequently engaged to assist in the load-balancing and tidying up to an industrial standard of the current software solution, as well as providing an ongoing support service for the package.
EU Multi-National Manufacturing Company Production Support System
An EU multi-national company with factories in Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany, and with a sister company with an operation in Austria and Eastern Europe, have a business critical package that was originally designed by one senior engineer (also not a trained programmer). This package today runs a big piece of their business and is still written in Superbase. For the last 18 months, they have been doing a phased migration using the SIMPOL database at the back end, the Superbase program at the front end, and doing all new development in SIMPOL, while gradually replacing modules of the Superbase program with new code written in SIMPOL. The package is sufficiently successful in the Western European company, that a trial is planned for the sister company at their headquarters, and assuming a successful implementation, will be rolled out to many more factories in Eastern Europe.
US Law Office Management Software
A New Jersey based lawyer primarily active in the real estate closings business decided to produce a software package to manage his law office, and found the Superbase product sufficiently accessible for both his early stage and late stage development. Over the course of time, he built a highly successful support package that enabled his small office to easily handle a case load four times the size of that handled by a typical office with a comparable staff.
He showed this software to others in his profession, and the interest in selling it as a solution grew. He brought in some additional help, enhanced the original package, made it modular, with common core functionality, and ties into fax solutions, email, and word processing, etc. He is currently building a new business to handle selling the enhanced package.
He has begun attracting significant finance and an experienced partner, who already sold one software company successfully, to sell the product across the US, and expects to make it a major player in the law office management software space. They expect to do a phased migration from the 16-bit Superbase package to the new SIMPOL-based code over the course of a couple of versions.
Trucker Software
A US-based trucker, originally working with a personal computer in the back of the cab of his large 18 wheeler (in the sleeping area), wrote a software management package to handle the growing amount of paperwork (job pricing, routing, tax calculations, tax form printouts, invoicing, truck maintenance, driver settlement, expense reports, P&L, and various other components) and eventually started selling it to other truckers. Today he has over 3000 customers that use his product. He is hoping to migrate to SIMPOL and also take his software to the next level in the coming years. He had already begun to expand beyond simple single driver packages to managing small fleet operations as well.
Distributed Entertainment Bureau Management Package
A small Edinburgh based entertainment bureau successfully used the new Internet Protocol based access method for Superbase (implemented in 1998 and also an integral part of the new Simpol product), to create a distributed agency system with 5 different offices all working together with one data set located in the main office. The original software was created by the head of the entertainment bureau himself, and also updated to use the Internet Protocol methodology to expand his business while still having central control over the data. He is expecting to migrate to SIMPOL when the product is released.
UK Fertility Clinic Package
A UK-based fertility surgeon created a gradually ever more complex package based on Superbase to manage his own clinic. Over time, he realized that the package that he had built could use some professional help and with that help he could successfully market and sell the package to other clinics. The help was found, and the package became more and more successful. At a major conference in the Netherlands, it was lauded as an excellent support tool and came out on top in a comparison with the leading competitive software provided by a US-based software company. Since then, it has acquired a strong footing in the UK, moving into a total of 12 clinics so far, and garnered interest abroad, in India, Spain, and other countries. The company is building itself gradually, and once they reach the tipping point will start to grow significantly. This software is also slated for redesign in SIMPOL once the product is ready to ship.
Pricing Package with Drawing Engine for Kitchen Installers
A fabricator on the US east coast began in the late 80's creating a package to help him calculate the price of complex installations using a spreadsheet and word processor. He then discovered Superbase and immediately jumped ship, realizing that a database package was much more likely to meet his needs. Over the years he built a fully realized drawing package for pricing jobs in the kitchen counter top fabrication business. He successfully incorporated all the solid surfacing products into his database so that the drawing produces precise price quotes. The resulting product was so good that it came to the attention of Dupont Corian® Division and went on to revolutionize pricing in the industry. A later product (rewritten from scratch in a more advanced version of Superbase) with a generic architecture allows a company to price anything that can be drawn against an appropriate database, such as roofing, flooring or siding. Visual Pricing software allows precise profit-margin tuning and unprecedented speed and precision in this critical business process. The company is developing the next product in SIMPOL from the bottom up because its unique and innovative capabilities will keep them ahead of the curve in the growing small business automation market.
Closing Notes
The above are only a few of the packages that have been written in Superbase, the product that SIMPOL was designed to replace and take to the next level. They are, however, very typical of the kinds of sophisticated packages that are created by normal people who have chosen to create solutions to their own problems, rather than adapt their business to somebody else's software (assuming such a thing existed in their niche).
