Sunday, March 16, 2014

If the shoe fits, wear it proudly and with style

There's an old expression that the cobbler's children have no shoes.  There is some truth to the idea that those who work hard producing a product rarely have the time and energy to do similar, but uncompensated, work for themselves.

At Yozons, while it's true that we've built many far more complex systems for our customers than we ever did for ourselves, we are not cobblers, and we've always lived with the contrary motto that we should "eat our own dog food."  And we do, though we think it's way cooler than dog food.

Here at Yozons, we use our technologies in myriad ways:
  1. Our secure document delivery capabilities are used to communicate updates with investors.  On occasions, it's also use to transfer sensitive information that doesn't fit the solutions listed below, including credit card information, SSNs/EINs, etc.
  2. Our main sales agreement and invoice incorporates a 7-step workflow that starts with the sales rep, goes to the order reviewer only if there is custom forms development, is approved by a sales manager, can optionally be approved by a customer reviewer for technical and pricing correctness, is then signed by the customer, countersigned, and finally processed by accounting to reconcile payments by checks or those automatically charged when a credit card payment is used.
  3. We have an online sign-up form that customers can use to purchase directly using a credit card, which is then routed to technical support for installation and then accounting for payment reconciliation.
  4. We use e-Docs to store files and scanned images (such as -- thankfully rarely received -- faxes) in our secure repository.
  5. We have an individual contributors license agreement for those who help provide software code and/or documentation assistance.
  6. A mutual NDA is used when dealing with parties who need private details about our company, and more often, so those parties can divulge private details about their projects and plans with us.
  7. We have a sales agent and reseller agreement for engaging sales representatives and resellers.
  8. A partner developer agreement for those who help build custom solutions for our customers.
  9. A patent license agreement with royalty provisions for those who purchase a license to our U.S. Patent No. 7,360,079.
  10. And finally, a credit card authorization form mostly for those whose credit cards on file need to be updated.
In subsequent postings, we'll describe briefly how our various customers use our technologies, as they seem to handle a wide variety of tasks that differ dramatically from our own cobbler's needs.


2 comments:

  1. What is the most complex workflow ever implemented by on the Yozons e-contracting platform?

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    Replies
    1. We are posting stories about various customer deployments so you'd have to be the judge. In general, a complex document process is a sign of a poor workflow. For example, we've had customers who started with a 14-step sales process, but they eventually pared it down to just 5 and their success jumped dramatically. Too many steps generally slows things down. Rarely is every actual step needed to be part of a document workflow. But even our most basic HR onboarding system we just implemented has 15 documents across 4 parties.

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