The classic of Marxism and the founder of Leninism had to waste some 10 million lives in the Russian Civil war and starve another few million to death with War Communism, only to come to the truism in the epigraph by the end of his life.
After considering all pros and cons, we decided to settle for fewer victims.
‘Given: a bucket of manure and a dumb priest, the task is to build Communism.’ We thoroughly look for signs of good sense in the muddy flow of inquiries such as the one above.
These are the reasons we do it:
- tis better to lose with a wise man than to win with a fool. More details on this in a separate article.
- in the dilemma of ‘some money now vs. reputation of the product in the long run’ we definitely choose the latter and demand the same of our partners.
- as a consequence of the preceding, when making the decision on taking a project, we look up to Octavianus Augustus.
This noble man, according to Suetonius, ‘started a war only when he was sure, that he would gain more in a victory than lose in a defeat.’ - Ultima is the only company on the market that gets paid only after a successful launch,
and only by happy customers.
This self-imposed limitation is an exceptionally reliable insurance from a hard-to-resist temptation: ‘I’ve no idea what you’re guys talking about, but we’re gonna take the money up front and then leave it all to fate.’
Unfortunately, our colleagues in this risky business willingly give in to this temptation. - the customer pool, though it’s respectively small in number, due to its high quality, generates a sufficient cash flow for a life of ease and investments into product development.
Even in these hard times .
Our implementation methodology also focuses on filtering out dubious ideas at early stages of a project that don’t involve taking money from customers.
It happens that we’re approached by smart people with reasonable ideas. Who are constrained, however, by intercorporate restrictions, which they can’t overcome and which make the probability of success next to nothing. Such situations are typical of large businesses.
Especially the ones originated from abroad.
So, say, Auchan (all coincidences here are accidental) approaches us with an intention to build an e-commerce unit based on Ultima. The people are more than adequate, the goals and plans are more than reasonable. However, there’s an indispensible attachment hereto – three (!) different currently functioning accounting systems that serve to the needs of different areas of the main company business.
Which, naturally, require ‘integration’. Here’s a tidbit: some of these ‘systems’ are French (remember French cars?) and have been mutating in an incomprehensible way (and documented the same) since the times of black and white television or since God knows when.
The end is quite predictable.
That’s too bad.
This example is quite typical: half of the retailers familiar to everyone have approached us with a problem presented in a similar way.
Or let’s have a look at a company, which is the biggest in the CIS (at the time when this text is published) in trading and manufacturing of construction materials.
They, too, kind of want to develop their online retail, in accordance with the spirit of the times.
But they have a different misfortune: a total vacuum of political will on the upper level of decision making.
Against this background, we don’t even consider a multimillion pile of dysfunctional stuff bought earlier, like hybris, being a hurdle (just a minor drawback). The vacuum of political will turns the company into a bureaucratic whorehouse capable of nothing but handwaving. Then again, we’ve already provided the link to the corresponding information.
It’s a pity, but we’re on different paths with these folks. And the current market leader is unlikely to survive until 2020.
Our approach results in 100% successful implementations. Not a single breakdown, as they say.
The industry in general has no reliable statistics (and it can not have one). However, it’s a long held perception that 80% of attempts of ERP system implementations end up in failures.
Obviously, Ultima implementations also differ in quality of their success, and in the fact we are not proud of all the cases.
It’s launched, it works. Yes, it’s better than it used to be, but there’s no revolutionary breakthrough. Is there anything here to sing about? No. So, these are the installations that we, of course, don’t write about.
But.
If you searcg the Internet, you won’t find a single comment from our customer whom we offended and/or
deceived.
Compare with the household names in this business.
By the way, not long ago some wary folks from Kazakhstan conducted a similar search on their own and came to an unexpected (for us) conclusion: it looks kind of suspicious, so it just can’t be true.
Market leaders use Ultimate IEM solutions.
There cant be many leaders, if anything, there’s just one first place.
They are usually the ones who want to get things done.
And if you choose fashion over function…
Well, then the doors leading to the crowd of people snobbishly stepping on the rakes are always wide open.
P.S. Wait, there’s one more significant factor that might not be obvious to an outsider: we don’t lie.
If we mention a company’s name in our implementation results, it means that without any reservation all of its main business processes have been automated based on an Ultimate IEM system.
Whereas the great majority of our colleagues (in number) act to impress their website visitors with abundance of logos in ‘Our Customers’ section: some Willow Creek Sanitarium that belongs to one of an uncountable Gazprom branches – Redneck Non-Core Asset Management Office, LLC, – paid for IT support of their 1C accounting system to a local 1C franchisee.
So, now they say that ‘Gazprom is our customer’.