Well, we've made it past Thanksgiving and we're cruising towards Christmas and New Years not to mention all the other holidays that cluster about the ancient solstice demarcation and the start of the relengthening of the day. It's a special time here in Vermont, where it often feels like we're still in 1872 or so. We had our first snowfall but it was just 4 inches, not too deep that we couldn't hike, en famille, along the ridge of Hurricane Hill, cutting back from Suicide Six right down to our toasty fireplace.

We also went to Vermont Country Store, where little items you long since thought had been discontinued, like Mint Julips candy, are still on the shelves. I bought some nice rubber bottom/leather top boots with stretch material near the top, for snow shovelling and wood gathering and garbage hauling, three of my best jobs around the house.

They had the original Monopoly, the original Clue, little bottles of ointment, pure cola for upset tummies, brand new "old bikes" including one made of bamboo. We went down with my brother, his wife, his three grown children and a husband, plus my wife and two kids (19 and 14), so ten in all. It was a lot of fun! Because of my work here at MISys, I looked at everything slightly differently--where was this made? how was it made? was it outsourced? or is the ointment left over from 1935, the last year they actually made it?

Over the next few weeks, please feel free to share your warm little end-of-the-year stories, whether tied back to manufacturing or not! I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

So what does Lean Manufacturing mean to you? Is it just the latest buzz word? Is it just JIT re-stated? Is it applicable to smaller firms than say, Toyota? We'd be interested to hear your thoughts on Lean, as we receive leads from manufacturers listing lean as a requirement.

From my research (and I'm no manufacturing guru, so take it with a grain of salt) it seems to come down to keeping inventory as low as possible and reducing waste at every step. Duh! If that's what it is, then MISys has been doing lean since before it was called Lean.

That being said, one of our highly proficient business partners, who does deserve the label guru, shared that he was able to create a kanban system for one of our large MISys users. It essentially creates a nearly real-time graphic that shows dynamically the levels of inventory, color-coded, without needing to enter MISys or run reports. MISys is still running, of course, it just interprets MISys data, via Excel, and shows it on a computer screen, thus giving personnel an immediate and current glance at where they are at with their inventory. Kanban without the little colored postcards!

We'd love to hear from other business partners what creative solutions they have developed for their customers, and I mentioned to Dave Brown that MISys should have a place on its web-site for solution concept sharing. Maybe another MISys business partner has a request to develop a similar kanban system. Another one I heard of in the background but know little about is bringing time and billing information into MISys by the job. This is another request we have from prospective MISys users, so if it's do-able we'd love to know about it and we'd love to see that kind of resource shared in some way. Your thoughts?

From an e-zine article:

Small business accounting market booming 29 September, 2005 by Mark Cox

Small businesses with under 100 employees in the U.S. spent approximately $410 million (U.S.) on purchasing accounting software solutions in the last 12 months, and this figure is expected to cross the half-billion-dollar mark by 2008. The nearly six per cent annual increase in accounting-software-related dollars augurs well for industry-leader Intuit (with their QuickBooks portfolio) and Microsoft, which recently jumped on the small business bandwagon with its release of Small Business Accounting 2006. More than ever before, SBs are searching for solutions that are easy to install, user-friendly and, most importantly, tailored specifically to their size. In addition, nearly three-fourths of these businesses upgrade their accounting software package every one to two years, opening the door for consideration of new solutions.

These are among the conclusions released Wednesday by New York-based consulting firm Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc., drawn from its surveys of small and medium businesses (SMBs) in key developed and emerging market countries that account for almost three quarters of total SMB IT spending. AMI-Partners conducts annual tracking surveys of SMBs in more than 20 countries, including North America (U.S. and Canada); Europe (U.K., France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland and Russia); Asia-Pacific (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand); and Latin America (Mexico and Brazil).

AMI-Partners' annual small business tracking studies show that more than half of all small businesses still do not use any accounting software solution. "These small businesses may be using spreadsheets or even paper and pencil for their accounting needs. However, pressures to operate more efficiently, improve compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory requirements, and the need to electronically exchange information with larger customers and suppliers make it likely that many of these companies will deploy accounting solutions in the future," said Arjun Mehra, research analyst at AMI-Partners.

One aspect of this is having access to an audit trail that mirrors their cash flow accurately. According to Mehra, small businesses are faced with the prospect of managing their finances efficiently with internal staff that is not very technology savvy.

"It makes perfect business sense for SBs to switch to an accounting software solution that is geared towards them and does not require costly training to deploy," he said.

AMI-Partners said Intuit's QuickBooks suite of products -- Pro and Basic -- has long dominated the $150 to $300 price band. Intuit's major strength lies in the fact that they have aggressively pursued this market with their low-end offerings and their product mix ranging from Simple Start (at $99) to QuickBooks Premier (at $499). It is this intense focus on the SB space that has enabled Intuit to ward off competition from Microsoft and Sage Software to date. Simple Start is an ideal low-cost package for small business start-ups, which have the option of upgrading to Basic or Pro as their needs evolve and the company grows. Intuit has ensured that customers can seamlessly upgrade from one Intuit product to the next, keeping many small and even midsize businesses in the Intuit fold.

Prior to releasing Small Business Accounting 2006, Microsoft attempted a foray into the SB financial space via Microsoft Money, which is more geared towards consumers. Microsoft business-solutions products, such as Great Plains and Solomon, have been too expensive and complex for most small business needs. In fact, Microsoft tried marketing a scaled-down version of Great Plains without success. However, many small businesses use Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet for accounting, and its Outlook application for contact management and e-mail. Microsoft's brand, its Office integration story, and the Office-like look and feel of SBA are likely to attract interest from one of its key target audiences -- small businesses that don't currently use accounting software. Customers who already use Microsoft programs may feel comfortable trying Microsoft's accounting software, as it promises to require minimal training to get up to speed. SBA allows clients to import data from Excel, and to port data from their existing QuickBooks software -- features that Microsoft hopes will entice QuickBooks users to its side.

Priced under $200, Microsoft's Small Business Accounting solution -- coupled with Microsoft's extensive penetration of the small business desktop productivity market -- may create the first real threat to QuickBooks' market dominance. However, Intuit customers have proved impervious to rival attacks in the past, and Intuit has proactively announced a new version of QuickBooks -- code-named Denali and slated for release in early 2006 -- to counteract Microsoft's SBA launch.

"One thing's for sure," Mehra said, "Microsoft will help educate many of the small businesses that have yet to adopt accounting software about the benefits of doing so -- which will likely spur sales not only for SBA, but for competitive offerings as well."

Let's hear it for Canada!

"According to a recent survey, the manufacturing sector in Canada employs over 2.2 million Canadians directly and accounts for 21% of Canada's economic activity. When spin-offs are included, such as the purchases of goods and services in Canada, manufacturers drive 55% of the economy".-----Soberman LLP, Chartered Accountants

My experience talking with many potential MISys customers from Canada is also that Canadian manufacturing is very creative, looking for interesting niches that can't be met by China. We love Canada!

Let's hear it from Canadians!

Yesterday afternoon Microsoft released to the world its new Small Business Accounting application. The MISys crew watched on streaming video, and one of our staff attended the unveiling. It was very impressive, particularly (and obviously) with SBA's integration with other key components of Office such as Outlook, Word and Excel. Pretty hot stuff!

Read about it here http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/07/HNsmallbizmicrosoft_1.html?source=NLC-TB2005-09-07

MISys is still on track for a Q4 release of MISys Small Business Manufacturing (SBM) and we are certainly receiving sweet encouragement from Microsoft. They couldn't be much more enthusiastic!

So far this blog has not received much attention, but if any readers have opened up and played with SBA, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

As the winds of Katrina are blowing by, much abated from the horror of the Gulf coast, I am reminded how lucky we are in Vermont in terms of weather. Yes, we get snow and occasionally ice, and every 50 years or so a hurricane sneaks up the Connecticut River valley, but generally it's quite benign. Our sympathies go out to those caught in the ravages of Katrina, and in particular to our customers and business partners. We hope you are back to normal in the shortest time possible.

Speaking of winds, the winds of change are blowing here at MISys. We are invited to be a part of the official September 7th release of Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting, generally referred to as SBA. MISys Small Business Manufacturing (SBM) is one of just 5 products invited to participate as 3rd party products for SBA.

Here's a review from June http://myitforum.techtarget.com/articles/14/view.asp?id=8719

Kudos to Microsoft for the release of SBA, and we're tickled to be part of the event. If you're interested to know more please e-mail me at al@misysinc.com. We have a streaming video presentation that will show you exactly how we work with SBA.

Wow, has it been almost a month? A week on the Cape, then a week catching up on tasks here at MISys..it goes pretty fast!

I'm not overwhelmed, or even whelmed, by the response to the blog so far, so I'd like to hear from people if they even stop in and read it or look at it. Either e-mail me at al@misysinc.com or try leaving a comment on this post. You can either comment anonymously or you can enter your name.

I have hoped the blog might be a good setting for people to chat about manufacturing issues in general, like, for example

WHAT DOES LEAN MANUFACTURING MEAN TO YOU?

If you'd like to share on this question, please do!

Enjoy the remaining bits of summer...it's a long cold winter in Vermont!