A few months ago, I was reminiscing about my early experiences learning computer science and was celebrating an odd anniversary. Back in September, when I wrote that, I had yet to know I would be exploring new employment options only 60 days later. It seems too cliche to say, “Everything happens for a reason,” but having spent the last four months of my life researching options and considering new work avenues, I am beginning to wonder.
Some of the last four months have been spent digging through old paperwork and projects to purge and streamline my environment. In the process, I stumbled over a couple of my favourite developments, and now I am deep into modernizing the ideas for a re-launch of sorts.
MANIX was first released in 1997 and was the first commercial software released from Aasland Technologies. It was MRP (Material and Resource Planning) Software that built on several previous inventory and project planning software projects I had done for custom contracts.
MANIX was entirely written in Visual Basic, was Internet-enabled, and could take in live data from the factory floor to inform purchasing and labour scheduling decisions in near real-time. In addition, it calculated estimated waste, machine wear, and other environmental data to improve the accuracy and competitiveness of custom manufacturing quotes. Of course, there are many commercial alternatives today, but in 1997 that was revolutionary.
The second commercial release from Aasland Technologies happened in 1999 and was specifically built to help legal teams process paper more efficiently. Legal Beagle came about from a conversation with a group of paralegals and assistants who spent much of their day filling in forms and modifying contract language to suit specific situations. This application automated most of the work so they could take on more clients and get more done without breaking a sweat.
With both of these, the opportunity came from real customer problems that needed to be solved but were not unique to one particular customer. Both were valuable at the time, but that was 26 years ago, and a great deal has changed since then. However, the lessons learned, and the foundations of why these were successful won’t be lost to time.
It won’t be released on CD (do they still make those?) and will not require an on-site installation visit, but I plan to incorporate many of the concepts in these applications into a new venture that I’ll discuss in a future post. The problems have not gone away; they have just changed shape. Now that I have some time on my hands, I can use some of it to build more useful tools like this.
There may be something karmic in the air, but I am not the only technical entrepreneur forced into unemployment in the last six months who likely has a great idea waiting to get out into the wild.
Be Awesome; Change the World.
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