Projects
Six months, six new microservices/APIs at TECTRA Ltd , a company that I am a Managing Director of, that enable us to increase responsiveness and consistency by
a) making access to decision-making information (pricing, inventories, historical payment terms, etc.) instantaneous, as well as to
b) generate/update customer-facing information rapidly and with minimal effort.
Also, this now enables customer/segment/product/family-level analyses and dashboards, as well as neat tricks such as customer-engagement evaluations, offered-vs-invoiced metrics, segment-based profitability tracking, pricing rules of thumb, etc. (things I learned while at Hilti ).
Initially an experiment, getting this set of services off the ground and into daily productive use was certainly faster than the implementation of any commercial third-party ERP/CRM straitjacket, both in terms of development and maintenance effort, and in terms of information search/retrieval/management/generation.
The vision is: as customer-oriented as Skroutz and as user-friendly (in terms of information retrieval) as early-2000s Google. When? We’ll see.
Something to chew on:
SMEs can become more digital by taking legacy business processes, reducing accumulated cruft and streamlining them, and then gradually taking great processes and turning them into great digital processes.
After all, turning a crappy process digital results in a digital crappy / crappy digital process.
First get a great process working (do Lean, whatever), then make it digital.
And, for sure, SME do not become digital by installing a bloated ERP that ends up becoming what dictates how work gets done, discarding years of experience.
The content of the screenshot, for non-Greek-speakers:
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ProductItems: API for issuing/managing item codes for single-item products, and for bundle configuration management.
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VATcheck: API for retrieving/storing/enriching info and classifying customers using NACE-related values from the EU VIES and the Greek GSIS databases.
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Depot: API for inventory management.
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Τιμολόγια: search across issued invoices going as far back as 2016.
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CaseTrack: the management backend for our order tracking service at track.tectra.gr
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Offer: API that generates quotation/offer documents with QR codes for track.tectra.gr as HTML pages ready-to-print to PDF, and optionally as ready-to-download as an editable ODT document.
Everything has been implemented in Python Django or FastAPI (one in Django Ninja), dependency management with poetry, CSS-themed with Bootstrap 5, and is self-hosted on a Debian Linux server with low power consumption.
