Hope everbody enjoyed the fireworks and barbecue over the long holiday weekend. I didn't do much in the way of raucous celebrating (with explosives or otherwise) because I spent the better part of the weekend feeding my laptop with a condensed version of piles of paperwork for our software implementation. I'll spare you the gory details, but I'll just say this: anything even remotely related to accounting is, for me, profoundly challenging and just thinking about cost accounting, manufacturing burden, work-in-process and suspense accounts give me a stellar migraine. I now have the utmost respect for the people who do can magically produce income statements from a pile or receipts, those who can use their superherolike inborn ability to translate the hieroglyphs we call a tax code, and the ladies and gentlemen who, without any trace of condescension, kindly answer my hideously simplistic questions with a smile and the patience of Job. I could sooner be a brain surgeon on Mars than be an accountant. Connie, I raise my hat to you. As difficult this has been for me (and it has -- by design, my graduate degree is in something that has nothing to do with numbers), I have been learning a lot about how this end of the business works.
For you, the customer, this means we will ultimately have a beautiful system that drips with transparency and efficiency. This exercise is forcing all of our key people to effectively dump their combined knowledge into this software so that we can all immediately benefit from the experience of others. As a customer, that means we'll know exactly where your order is, be it in the third stage of production, on our shipping dock waiting for the carrier to pick it up, or if it's on the delivery truck en route to you. We will have improved management of our inventory, so we'll know if the part you are ordering is on the shelf and ready to go, or if we have to build it from scratch -- and we'll know if all of the raw materials are here to be made into your parts. In about 6 weeks all of this will be coming to fruition. I better quit typing and get to work.
