Welcome to Smuggle Me

Acorn Systems is a revolutionary concept in managing a company’s profits. They enable meaningful and sustained profit improvement by providing continuous enterprise-wide visibility into business performance. They do this with their profitability analysis software combined with their proven consulting methodology. It’s a great tool for doing Activity Based Costing (ABC).

Acorn Systems is able to accurately measure, optimize and predict costs, net operating profits, EVA, capacity and resources at any level of granularity such as by customer, supplier, product, facility, transaction and more. Essentially it takes all the data that you have captured and puts it in a usable format for company executives.

This type of technology is great for businesses working on maximizing profits. Of course, that’s EVERY business!!

I’ve been ordering servers for my job for the past 3 years. I love doing it, but the hardest part is staying up on the latest technology. The best server technology I’ve found has to be a Blade Server.

Why you might ask?
There are a ton of reasons. Most of which is that blade servers are huge space savers. They have a shared power supply and network lines. I was visiting IBM one day and they had a sweet blade server connected to a SAN. Talk about a sweet setup. They yanked out the power supply and nothing happened. Talk about redundancy built in. Soon you’re going to be able to migrate your O/S from one blade to the other.

So, this post is rambling a little. I’m not a salesperson. Talk to someone at ClearCube if you want to get the sales pitch. Trust me. Learning about blade servers may be the best thing you can do for your business.

At work my boss has been freaking out about not being able to manage all of the various assets we are resonsible for. Granted we are a technology group that has a pretty large area of responsibility and a ton of computer assets. Plus, he’s paying the price when the “higher ups” keep asking him to report on what computers we have in our inventory.

Asset Management Software is really his only solution. He’s tried wasting his time with a spreadsheet and an access database (translate glorified spreadsheet). He even tried to do it in our ticket system, but trust me that is a crappy solution.

Netsimplicity seems like it might just be the right solution for us. I think I’m going to tell him to do the Visual Asset Manager Free Trial.

This lists is enough reason to spend the time trying it out:

# Automatically discover and audit Windows workstations throughout your organization.
# Manage inventory: This asset management software can inventory facility, operational and IT assets. Scan and print barcodes; track leases, maintenance, depreciation repair history and fair market value.
# Visually map assets to assigned locations and employees, locate them instantly, and manage office relocation.

The visual map’s great. The barcodes are even better. Now they just need to sell some barcode scanners.

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Last weekend I went down to Arkansas for a job interview. It was a great job and had a lot of potential. However, it only did part of the things that I love. I would be helping with their technology, but they also wanted me to become an expert witness (which is their core business). That’s a fantastic opportunity that could pay a lot of money. However, I decided that wasn’t me.

What am I? As I thought about it, I LOVE to be able to implement technology in a business and totally revolutionize the way they work. I guess that’s why I love working in the healthcare field. You can use tons of great technology to increase the level of care given to patients. Not to mention they are way behind the curve on their use of technology so I can make a significant impact.

I was talking to someone recently about technology and I realized how much I love technology. A teacher of mine in college had the entire class cheering, “Technology is where it’s at BABY!!” I guess I still have that vision. A business should learn about technology because I think it can revolutionize your processes.

An 8 year old has already started his own little small business tutoring people in how to play Halo.

The brown-eyed second grader, Victor De Leon III, has been tutoring gaming greenhorns in Halo 2, an Xbox game in which the player fights to save Earth from destruction, for $25 an hour. That’s a ton of money, considering most of his peers have no income beyond their tooth-fairy stash.

“It’s fun,” said the digital-pastime prodigy, who’s been tutoring people online from the gaming room of his Mastic home for more than a year.

His students hail from as far away as Australia. He’s even given some free pointers to New Jersey Net star Richard Jefferson.

“He’s better at basketball,” Victor giggled.

His proud father, Victor De Leon II, said Jefferson was pretty star-struck meeting the youngster, who goes by the name Lil Poison II in gaming circles.

“He actually asked my son for his autograph,” said De Leon.

Victor happily obliged but had to print it because he doesn’t know cursive yet.

With video games getting bigger and bigger business, this guy has an amazingly bright future ahead of him if he can capitalize on the skills he’s created.

In my career I have worked at a dozen of different places. In all of those places, I have come across one universal need for each and every business: Document Management Software.

Let me just highlight a few examples:

While in college I worked with a document management company where I first realized how great document management could be. I saw how the legal and real estate industry could not survive without some sort of Contract Management Software. If you could only see the piles of paper that lawyers and real estate agents created. Well, you can imagine if you’ve ever bought a home or been through any sort of legal issue how many papers those people go through.

The key isn’t to just have those documents electronically. The key is to have a document management software that is able to convert that scanned image into text and make it searchable. Then, you’ve derived the real power out of that document. Or as FineTooth Contract Management Solution says you’ve pulled out simple, searchable and actionable intelligence.

Well, I then proceeded to work at a couple University systems. Just imagine almost 30,000 students sending in applications, reference letters, transcripts, scholarship applications and you can quite easily see why document management was a great necessity in education.

I then proceeded to work in the healthcare industry. Me oh my!! I can’t believe how much paper doctors use. Even more crazy is how much paper gets sent between doctors. I thought fax machines were out of style, but I was wrong. I haven’t even gotten started on those stacks of papers that patients give you showing their past medical history.

What to do with all the paper?

Easy, it’s the universal need: Document Management Software. It’s worth every penny you pay for it.