So what can Sumer do?
Many businesses already have forms and procedures to handle these common management tasks
- Purchase Order control,
- Receiving and sequence coding of raw materials,
- Inventory tracking and control including direct and flush-back materials tracking,
- Customer Orders,
- Tracking, completion, and cancellation of back orders,
- Production control,
- Scheduling for shifts, meetings, production runs, projects, Gantt charts,
- Employee time cards and payroll,
- Wholesales and invoices,
- Docket scheduling and control,
- Retail cashiering and point-of-sale,
- Bookkeeping and accounting,
- Full user log and audit trail,
- Instant End-Of-Period inventory posting to accounting,
- Graphic reporting,
- Intra-company communications,
- Cash flow analysis and control,
- Bill of Materials and Process costing and routing,
- and more.
Sumer can do these.
Why is Sumer different?
In 1970 IBM researcher Edgar Codd introduced the brilliant and remarkably successful relational database model. Development naturally focused on large business applications. And although the databases themselves are efficient, development and maintenance requires armies of specialized programmers and technicians, making them highly labor intensive.
Unfortunately, later evolution into applications for SMEs simply recycled big business models, and this recyling missed some important points:
1) SMEs have special needs:
- no specialized IT staff or outsized IT expenses,
- flexibility to meet changing demands without seeking out entirely new software or expensive modules,
- an intuitive software interface so managers can devote time to business rather than mastering complex technology.
2) SMEs have patterns:
- every business is unique, but all businesses repeat common patterns: a Purchase Order is like a Production Order, and like a Customer Order, and like a Shipping Order... SMEs could be considered less a database than a patternbase.
Keeping it simple
So Sumer's intent in design was to be:
- free of jargon,
- free to download,
- free to add users,
- simple to use,
- offering open-source templates,
- requiring no knowledge of IT,
- with data in the cloud based only on data storage fees,
- and with a platform encouraging peer-to-peer sharing in the medium and small enterprise and organization communities.
Keeping it simple means:
-
Forms and reports are built with a spreadsheet-style interface that looks exactly like the underlying form,
-
Menus are built with drag-and-drop and can be customized down to an individual user level,
-
That's all.