Precisio Takes Inventory Management to the Cloud

The forecast for information management is cloudy and innovative developers are hard at work building new cloud-computing solutions. One such innovator is New Jersey-based Precisio Business Solutions. Although it is a small company, Precisio is playing a big role in bringing inventory management up to the skies.

Precisio was founded by experts in wireless inventory management products and warehouse computer networking solutions who teamed together to build a single, unified inventory control system. Company leaders understand the importance of easy, reliable data collection and real-time inventory information. Co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing Shaun McInerney has more than twenty years of experience in bar coding, printing, and labeling, and has experienced first hand the challenges that warehouse operators face while managing the batch processes of traditional solutions.

After building an initial .NET-based inventory control solution, McInerney and Chief Architect Akbar Rafiuddin determined that the most effective way to compete in the future would be to create the inventory control component of a complete, cloud-computing business solution. They also decided that Force.com was the best platform to help them with that vision. According to McInerney, “We were a Salesforce CRM customer and became an early Force.com developer. We realized that the future was in the clouds, and we could see the potential that existed with Force.com. The expertise that we brought to the table for inventory management as a perfect fit for what salesforce.com had already done with CRM. It was easy to integrate with the data models and platform.”

Measuring Development Time in Months, Not Years

Although Precisio’s developers are continually modifying and improving their Force.com solution (called Ascent), the company’s initial iteration went from planning stages to deployment in just five months. According to Rafiuddin, “What we did with Force.com would take twice as many people twice as long to build on .NET or Java. Development with Force.com is so fast that we can continue to enhance the product with features and add-ons, without adding years to our cycles.”

Force.com applications naturally leverage the efforts of the salesforce.com development team, and updates are automatically available for Precisio’s customers. According to McInerney, “Although we’re focused on inventory management, because we develop with Force.com, we benefit from everything that salesforce.com and their partners do. Every time salesforce.com’s R&D teams make an update, our customers can benefit. If our customers want to add apps for conducting surveys, or recruiting, or tracking expenses, or just about anything else under the sun, they can get it from AppExchange. Salesforce.com does the heavy lifting so we can focus on innovation.”

Another advantage of developing with Force.com is its capacity for easy, quick, and reliable deployment. “ We can support double the customers with half as many people,” says Rafiuddin. “In the old format we’d have to log into each client’s implementation and update them all individually. And we’d be subject to a variety of unknowns – the customer’s servers, networks, even their disciplines. But with Force.com’s multitenant architecture, all users share a single, common infrastructure and code base so updates are seamless.”

A Hands-on Approach to Cloud Computing

Precisio uses Apex – salesforce.com’s programming language, which runs on Force.com servers – to accomplish its business logic, but Force.com's pages is behind the elegance of the company’s inventory control system. Pages is the Force.com framework for creating feature-rich user interfaces for applications in the cloud. Often used by developers to create rich, robust user-interfaces, pages was used by Precisio to simplify its own interface, bringing the depth of its solution to the small form factor of the bar code scanner.

“One of the early limitations on what we were trying to do is the constraining factor of the hand held screen,” said Rafiuddin. “The visual interface in a bar code scanner allows a very small amount of space in which to work for transaction flow and data display. But the nature of our business is that you need to be able to input a lot of data – much more than for a typical Salesforce CRM record.”

Using pages, Precisio was able to bring the Salesforce CRM interface to the “small screen.” The framework is used throughout the Ascent product to enable data to be input easily – without needing to flip through multiple pages – and instantly brought to the cloud. Receipts, shipments, and materials movements are instantly recorded and decisions are based on current, factual information. Part numbers, locations, and quantities are validated real time, so that errors are virtually eliminated.

Force.com Community Support

McInerney and Rafiuddin attribute much of their success to the active and accessible Force.com community. Precisio has taken advantage of the discussion boards, Dreamforce sessions, and salesforce.com developers to answer its questions and keep its own development efforts moving ahead.

When Rafiuddin’s team encountered an issue early in development with positioning their code to stay under governor limits in Apex, they went to the Force.com discussion boards for help. Force.com experts suggested a different way to organize code, and the team was able to quickly fix the problem and continue coding.

According to Rafiuddin, “In traditional environments, you are at the mercy of the person in your organization with the most platform experience, or of external consulting services who are removed from your business but still charge a lot of money. The Force.com discussion boards provide direct access to an active user community, as well as the salesforce.com product managers and developers themselves. It’s easy to get help so you can move forward quickly, without spending a lot for a solution.”

Finding Commercial Success on the Force.com Platform

Today more than half of Precisio’s business is from Ascent, including a mix of both existing Salesforce CRM users, and direct Force.com customers. Clients include manufacturers and wholesalers for a wide range of products spanning from chemicals, to teleprompters, semi-conductors, office supplies, and shipping containers.

McInerney notes that his company has generated a significant amount of demand via its presence on AppExchange. Potential customers need look no farther than the “ Manufacturing” section of the site to find a data sheet, demo, and link for a free Ascent test drive. McInerney also found the annual Dreamforce conference a valuable way to meet potential customers, and notes that he booked a significant piece of business as a result of his attendance this year.

McInerney expects the Precisio’s Force.com-based business to continue to expand rapidly as more businesses move to cloud computing. The company plans to continue making improvements to Ascent and developing additional cloud computing solutions for inventory management.

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