Egilant provides business automation services for small to medium-sized businesses that enables them to focus on doing what they do best and differentiating themselves from their larger competitors.
It’s no secret that the business world is changing dramatically. While watching the ads during a televised sporting event, one can’t avoid the barrage of new business buzz words:
Logistics
Just-in-time inventory
Virtual resourcing
Value-chain management
Cloud-based computing
The long tail.
All of this is, at least to date, great for large enterprises that can afford multi-million dollar software licenses and business re-engineering projects, but what is a 200-employee company (or less!) to do?
The opportunity for smaller businesses is to use some of the same techniques and technology that large businesses do but without the multi-million dollar licensing fees, huge implementation costs or even data centers and IT staff.
Rather than simply squeezing pennies out of the cost for mass-market products, though, smaller businesses can focus on more unique products and more personalized services.
The opportunity is to exploit the so-called long tail, the smaller markets at the far reaches of the market distribution curve that command a higher price because they are exactly what the customers in those markets want. To let the huge faceless companies sell their customers best sellers and paper towels while our customers become known as the places to go for exactly what they do better than anyone else.
Egilant Automate is the core platform upon which all of Egilant’s products are based. It encompasses the best of resource scheduling, forms management, workflow, business planning and analysis tools in one platform that has the power of an expensive Enterprise Resource Planning product but requiring implementation expertise comparable to advanced Excel.
Egilant Staffing uses the resource scheduling power of the Automate platform to automate the staffing of event-based business functions from retail to catering. It’s calendar-based user interface allows managers to schedule shifts and assign employees to them automatically, manually or various approaches in between. Scheduling algorithms can take into account such factors as seniority, per-week caps on hours and much more.
There are certain processes performed by every business, regardless of industry or products. As a starting point for any automation project, it is essential that the basics are easy to handle so that your process designers can focus on the processes that add unique value to your business.
The Business 101 module includes forms and workflows to handle:
Purchase requisition and purchase orders.
Sales orders for processing.
General ledger and basic accounting.
Egilant Automate is not an accounting product. But everything a company does affects the companies books. No automation platform would be of any use without a way to document its activities and impacts on the bottom line. These basic capabilities, including integration with other industry accounting platforms allow Egilant Automate to be at the heart of a business’ processes, even as that business uses first in class products for its other important functions.
Egilant Inventory is designed to track all types of inventory whether store stocks, or manufacturing raw materials, work-in-progress and finished goods. It’s capabilities are comprehensive and include:
Managing individual items by serial number and lot
Tracking partial consumption (e.g., board feet of lumber, remaining contents of open containers and cases versus individual items)
Scanning in and out of inventory items by hand-held scanner or mobile app
Automatic triggering of purchase workflows when inventory drops below pre-configured levels
Integration with targeted point-of-sale vendors either via bulk exports or online integration.
Revenue is literally the life blood of any company. Predicting it is incredibly difficult and error prone. No technology has ever been developed that can accurately predict the future, but using available data to better inform the process of projecting revenue can make all the difference between doubling your business every year and facing the spirit-crushing fate of large layoffs.
Egilant Revenue is not a soothsayer, but it provides tools to let businesses better model their prospects.
Egilant Revenue resembles a spreadsheet in its user interface and can run thousands of simulations based on the likelihood of various market conditions to give a manager a range of revenue outcomes on a distribution curve.
Budgeting for any company is both essential and incredibly time-consuming. Along with knowing revenue, understanding spending is critical to ensuring a rosy bottom line.
Egilant Budget provides another spreadsheet-like interface to allow companies to define departmental or functional budgets.
Initial templates with proposed spending caps can be distributed to functional groups for bottom-up feedback and budget requests.
Iterative jobs allow for multiple rounds of request, review, feedback and ultimate approval at multiple levels feeding up to a final organizational budget against which all hiring and spending is approved for the following period.
Reviews of each cycle can be done via automatically scheduled meetings or purely through online collaboration, though typically a combination of the two will be most effective.
As anyone who has ordered products through any of the incredible online retail outlets now available knows, an essential part of the customer satisfaction process is timely and cost-effective delivery of products and services.
Egilant Logistics provides the tools necessary to optimize this critical element of the customer satisfaction cycle by
integrating with commercial delivery service manifest systems
scheduling company trucks for providing on-site services to customers
custom delivery options for high-end customers.
In many businesses, manufacturing and professional services to name two, accounting for labor costs are a critical piece of managing the business. Knowing that a business is spending less solving customer problems than it is charging them, and by how much, is the only way one can tell whether products and services are profitable in and of themselves.
Traditionally, labor costs have been tracked using spreadsheets or timecards. Even timecards that are tracked online are time consuming and prone to error due to non-compliance.
The Egilant Labor module uses Egilant’s unique time-management console to allow employees to track their time on various projects without completing timecards. This saves employees time and supports better compliance that ensures more accurate reporting.
Any operation that does manufacturing needs to be able to ensure that the components necessary to build products are on hand when needed and purchasing agents need to be able to negotiate acquisition of those components with knowledge of the number and types of those components. A final bill of materials (or BOM) is a major deliverable from engineering to manufacturing teams.
Egilant Bill of Materials provides a spreadsheet-like interface that allows products to be broken down, subassembly by subassembly until described at the individual part level. The purchasing catalog of the Business 101 module is used to price individual items and subassemblies to provide the parts cost of individual built products. The subassembly part numbers are used by the Inventory module to track work-in-progress inventory items either due to anticipated builds of subassemblies or return to inventory on canceled custom builds.
Printed BOMs can be traditional or graphically layered.
Management of complex inter-organizational projects has largely stumped tools and techniques companies have used for many decades. Traditional project management tools have tried to put unwieldy process around activities that lack structure while requiring unreasonable foresight into activities in the future that can often only be guessed at.
The Egilant Project module takes a different approach from other project management tools. While it takes its inspiration from agile software development methodologies, it neither encourages tracking progress on sticky notes nor stand-up scrum meetings. But it does encourage breaking up large projects into bite-sized pieces that can be completed end-to-end, from concept to delivery, in short time periods or sprints, as they are called in agile software process nomenclature.
More than thirty years of proven passion and leadership in software development, architecture, management and business with focus in data management, internet technologies and the cable and telecommunications industries.
I have a passion for finding ways to use technology to better the world from concept through design, development, marketing and customer success; demonstrated leadership and management skills; entrepreneurial and business acumen; marketing and product management experience;.
I am actively working to fill out key roles in the company’s management team and will insist on individuals with both the experience and the passion to build Egilant into the great company it will be.