 Welcome, everyone. This is Mark Ringo, Business Account Manager at FowlMaker, and I'm your host for today's Getting Rid of Paper-Based Process Web Seminar, where you'll learn how FowlMaker customers like Austin Convention Center, Ascend Aviation, McConnell's Ice Cream, SNG Seeds, and Penny Newman have leveraged FowlMaker Go to replace paper. But before we get started, I have some brief housekeeping notes on the next slide. For best experience, we strongly recommend that you participate in this Web Seminar with at least a broadband connection. If you have any problems or require online assistance at any time, please contact Citrix Technical Support at 888-259-8414. Again, that number is 888-259-8414. During today's presentation, you'll have an opportunity to type in questions. We briefly, we talk briefly about how to answer a question. Go to the control panel, click on question section to reveal the question section, and enter a question and send. We'll cover as many questions as time allows at the end of our presentation. Next, I would like to talk about the FowlMaker platform. The FowlMaker Business Productivity Platform is not just one product. It's a group of products and technologies that all work together. With the FowlMaker platform, you can create custom business solutions on Windows and Mac with FowlMaker Pro and FowlMaker Pro Advanced. FowlMaker Pro is our flagship product, and it's what you use to build solutions. However, if you build solutions for a team of people, you'll want to use FowlMaker Pro Advanced, which comes with power tools such as the Script Debugger, the Data Viewer, Database Design Report, and allows for custom menus and much more. FowlMaker Server is the hub of any successful FowlMaker deployment, which allows you to host your FowlMaker solution and provides automated backups and remote administration. And you'll need FowlMaker Server to use our new FowlMaker WebDirect, which is a breakthrough web technology that runs custom business solutions directly in a web browser on a desktop or laptop with no web development skills required. FowlMaker Go brings your FowlMaker solutions to your teams on iPads, iPhones, and iPod touch devices. All your FowlMaker solutions created with FowlMaker Pro will simply work on your mobile devices. And best of all, FowlMaker Go 13 is free on the App Store. Next, I would like to discuss the benefits of FowlMaker Go. What if I were to tell you you can instantly update current inventory levels from the warehouse while scanning barcodes? What if you can capture digital signatures to close sales deals on the road? What if you could collect research data, including photos and audio files in the field? What if you're able to swipe through patient records in the emergency room? And what if you can conduct teacher evaluations in the classroom? These are just some of the advantages of FowlMaker Go. Next, I would like to discuss why our customers have gotten rid of paper. Paper is hard to share with remote workers. The information on paper becomes obsolete very quickly. Paper is a very manual process. Paper is not secure. And storage of paper can become very, very costly over time. And the biggest problem we see with paper is more times than that you're going to have multiple versions of the truth. On the next slide, I want to discuss the Austin Convention Center Business Use Case. The Austin Convention Center transformed paper-based service order forms, work orders, and floor diagrams into a mobile application. That provides a mobile workforce, the ability to view, process, and reference event information across a facility that spans six city blocks. On the next slide, let's discuss how Austin Convention Center operated prior to FowlMaker Go. The exhibitor's work orders were based solely on faxes and paper. The orders were keyed into a system, printed out and placed into a binder with diagrams and other paperwork to start deployment or fulfill changes. It was a very, very manual process. Next, let's look at how the Convention Center has become more efficient with FowlMaker Go on iPad. The good news is the Austin Convention Center, they were already using FowlMaker Pro as the billing system. So they could leverage the skill set that they already knew in FowlMaker. They very quickly designed work order forms on the iPad. Employees now have real-time access to work orders, change orders, and floor diagrams and easy-to-use touch interface on the iPad. This led to fewer errors, faster installs, and increased customer satisfaction. But the biggest benefit was the compelling return on investment. With FowlMaker Go for iPad, the project payback was less than four months with an annual ROI of 200%. The estimated annual savings was $24,000. If you want more information on the Austin Convention Center business use case, please visit FowlMaker.com under solutions and under customer stories. There's a great video that accompanies the success story. Alright, on the next slide I would like to introduce the team from Excelsis today. We've got Doug who's going to be presenting a couple great use cases. Christo, the founder and president of the organization, and Kurt, who's the VP of Production Project Manager. Thank you, Mark. This is Doug, and I'm going to give you all a few details about Excelsis before we get started. The first of that being a photograph of us at FowlMaker DevCon this year a couple of weeks ago in San Antonio. So you can see some of the crew here. Excelsis was founded in 2001. We incorporated in 2004. So we've been around for quite a while. The company currently consists of five managing partners, three account managers, ten developers, and six of those ten developers are already certified in FowlMaker 13. A couple of those are scheduled to take the test soon, so we anticipate them passing as well. And we have a couple of developers who specialize in web applications. Now, most of our group is cross-trained, and so they're all well versed in a variety of development environments. We've been a proud member of the FowlMaker Business Alliance for the last 12 years, and this spring we were promoted to platinum level by FowlMaker Inc. We pride ourselves on out-of-the-box thinking, and we have seasoned developers and business professionals throughout the organization. Our agile development style is less formal and allows for faster changes with less overhead and less wasted time and effort. So we have clients ranging in size from sole proprietor to large corporations with hundreds of users across the globe. We've worked with public and private sectors, and we take ownership of our clients' problems. So whatever needs they have and whatever the nuances are of their business, we like to put ourselves in their shoes and really solve those problems from the inside out. So the first case study that we're going to look at today is Ascend Performance Materials and specifically the Ascend Aviation Division within that company. So Ascend Performance Materials, they're a premium provider of high quality chemicals, fibers, and plastics. They have thousands of employees, and their products are used in a variety of applications that ranges from turkey bags that you use for cooking the holiday turkey, to textiles for military and industrial clothing. The materials are also used in sporting equipment, household goods, wire connectors, cable ties, carpeting, all kinds of different applications. So they have a wide variety of experiences in various markets. The picture in the bottom right actually shows one of their Gulfstream jets in their Ascend Aviation Division. Their charter flight service is based out of Titoboro Airport in New Jersey and initially served just their own travel needs within the corporation, but they've branched out to some of their business associates as well. So as you might have guessed, software solutions in this market are quite expensive and they're not easy to adapt to differing business needs. So that's where FileMaker comes in. And when we look here on the left, we can see the forms that they were using previously. And when we started working with Brian, he's the head pilot at Ascend Aviation, these forms were used for recording all sorts of details about their flight expenses, including their fuel consumption and the price they paid for the fuel, what method of payment they used, all kinds of different fees like landing fees and ramp fees and parking fees and catering costs, all kinds of expenses associated with the trip. But on occasion the crew also had to stay overnight on these trips and make the return trip the following day. So they also tracked their hotel expenses and their meals and rental cars and all of that. Now that's a lot of paper and we transition over to now the current approach, which is our FileMaker Go-Based solution. And being tracked in the database, they connected to the hosted FileMaker server and the data is available to the main office in real time. So the passenger details and maintenance logs were also tracked on paper and flight itineraries for the passengers were printed in advance and sent to the passengers but then also provided to the crew. They'd carry them around on a clipboard so they knew what the meal preferences were and if there were any food allergies or anything like that. But then last minute changes, obviously they had to cross it out and scribble in the new information. So since the flight crew actually has Wi-Fi access on the plane at all times, they can now access the FileMaker solution from the cockpit of the airplane and just streamline the entire process. So they use FileMaker Pro in the office, they use FileMaker Go and WebDirect remotely and the system looks the same across all devices. The core concepts that we were focusing on with this this project were to you know when transitioning away from the paper, we wanted to start small, we wanted to target the pain points first and we wanted to make sure we were using our time effectively. So when starting small, we wanted to focus on the low hanging fruit first and in this case the passenger itineraries when mailing those to the passenger in advance, that's no longer necessary. Most people wouldn't even expect that service from an airline anymore. So we can now just attach a PDF to an email instead of printing a copy and putting it in the snail mail. So it's an easy step toward what I like to call paper prevention. If we stop the paper at the source, then we don't have to worry about scanning the documents later and archiving it because the paper never existed to begin with. And then identifying the pain points, you know, writing a few numbers on a clipboard for one flight is pretty quick and easy. But then when you have to collect the forms for a week's worth of flights, somebody has to try and decipher the messy handwriting and track down any missing information, that can all be a pretty major source of frustration. So we eliminate all that busy work with FileMaker Go. The remote users are entering the data in real time and there is no deciphering messy handwriting later. And then just because you can doesn't mean you should. So balancing cool with cost effective, we look at whether or not a particular feature is going to save time and money. If not, and it takes more than a few minutes to do, then we'll just put that off until later. We may decide that it's just never going to be worth the time and effort, no matter how much we might enjoy the challenge as a developer. It's easy to get distracted, but you have to try and focus on the ROI, the return on investment. Limit the fun stuff that has marginal value to the overall process and really focus on the highest value first. So we're going to take a look at the Ascend Aviation System here and I'm going to transition over to FileMaker and oops, sorry, I'm going to transition over to Keynote in this case because I have this running on my iPad. So Keynote allows me to present my iPad directly here on my Mac and I have a sample flight setup for you showing three stops. I'm going from KTB airport code to KHOU and back to KTB. So when we click on this, I'm just tapping this with my fingertip and here we can see the details of this flight. Obviously I have a lot of detailed information here including time zone differences and what you're looking at here, this is the second generation of this FileMaker solution and Brian developed the original, much of it himself, but he called us to have me help him with the more complex issues. Time zones and daylight savings time around the world, we have an internal routine in this system that checks a web service on a regular schedule to look for revised starting and ending dates for daylight savings and you may not have thought that this information would change all that often, but I actually remember a time not that long ago when Vicente Fox was the president of Mexico, he decided a month before the start of daylight savings that they just weren't going to observe daylight savings that year and if we had a bunch of printed itineraries floating around that obviously presents problem we would have to go and replace them all for our passengers. So having this electronic it's much easier, save it to PDF send it out and we're ready to go. We're also estimating the flight time based on not only the plane but the direction of the flight so to know if we have a headwind or a tailwind we can automatically calculate that behind the scenes and do all these complex formulas and get really professional results what you would expect out of a commercial airline system right here in a filemaker based solution. And now this second round of development was a complete redesign of this interface to make it better for the iPad. So we've added some features and some reporting in that second round and we consolidated two solutions into one. He was tracking his flight expenses separate from his flight details also the passenger itineraries and all of that. But if we take a look at some of the other tabs here if we go over to flight details here's where we were record how many gallons of fuel we used for this flight and the price that we paid and one of the cool things about filemaker go is that I can say what kind of keyboard I want to pop up on the iPad based on the nature of the information that I expect to have in that field. So here I know that I'm only going to enter numbers for the price that I paid so I can use just a basic numeric keypad. As a different type of field I've just changed this for display purposes in the top field we could pop up a little you know a phone keypad instead of a basic numeric keypad and we can obviously pop up a full text keyboard as well. But now going over to the crew here it was important that the role of the individuals be consistent with the order in which they were shown in the list. So these orange or I'm sorry the green buttons on the left we can reposition the crew members and when we do we have a little convenience feature built in here as well because I'm using this on the iPad I don't want to do a lot of data entry I don't want to do a lot of typing I want the system to think for me. So if I move Bill up to the top position and replace Brian I see that now Bill his role has also been promoted to captain and Brian has been changed to co-captain. So the system does that for me automatically when I reposition these these two crew members and we would have flight attendants listed here as well. So that's the basic idea and like I said the the interface looks the same through FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Go and FileMaker Web Direct. We've used this same layout on all three devices and and the sizing of all the objects has been developed precisely to be touch friendly and also work with the keyboard mouse on a regular desktop computer. So now if we switch back to our presentation sorry and hide that so doesn't pop up later and now we move on to our second case study McConnell's Fine Ice Creams this is a fun one I like ice cream. McConnell's they have you know fine ice creams that are made with local sustainable and organic raw materials they source their materials from partner farms and artisans and purveyors that they've worked with for decades so they really do have a passion for their products and for their customers and they have various locations throughout California they've been in business for over 65 years and they they serve the public through scoop shops with regular ice cream establishment where you would go in and order a cone of ice cream but they also have what they call their mick truck this is the picture at the top right and you can rent this truck for any any big party that you're gonna have or a mick cart on the right with the red umbrella you can rent those as well they also have a catering service and in the office they track all their orders in QuickBooks but they were looking to streamline their local deliveries they delivered locally to fine dining restaurants so they needed a mobile filemaker based solution to solve that problem and eliminate the inefficient paper pushing so the paper forms here on the left you can see what they were accustomed to using when recording the orders from their customers they fill out the quantities in the grids that you see there and since they hated updating the form they actually started adding new flavors and just put the names of those new flavors in the comments section on the right which then obviously leads to problems with data collection because they didn't have them in the grid where they should have been so they didn't they may not have known that one of these new flavors was not available in pint size containers it was only available in a two and a half gallon containers or you know something like that so we wanted to reduce the training burden we wanted to increase user satisfaction by sticking with something that works we didn't want to go with a traditional database look and feel we wanted something that would just be instantly recognizable for them so what we did was we maintained a familiar experience by just taking their form and building it into filemaker this is the filemaker pro filemaker go again this same layout used on the iPad and in filemaker go and in filemaker pro on the desktop so which by using the paper as the guide we didn't have to train them they already knew the process but we also eliminated a pain point because they no longer had to update the form we're pulling this information directly from QuickBooks so when new flavors are added in QuickBooks we have a server-based routine that pulls in their new products and their new container sizes and automatically draws them in the right positions on the form based on whether it's a seasonal flavor or premium sorbet or if it's just a traditional flavor the tool that we're using there behind the scenes is called Q ODBC and the really cool thing about this is that it allows our filemaker server to talk directly to QuickBooks and using SQL syntax through an ODBC connection lots of tricky stuff there but really nice result so that we can just have scheduled scripts that automatically transfer the data between the two systems for us so we've built this mobile front-end to QuickBooks using filemaker go now obviously you know we discussed that one of the challenges was that we wanted to make it less cumbersome than QuickBooks and here on the left-hand side you can see what the packing slips screen looks like in QuickBooks and what their actual product codes look like and they would have to look for you know if they wanted a burgundy cherry two and a half gallon container they would have to know that that's product code SB 2.5g SBT burgundy cherry seems obvious to us right and so we want to make sure that we're showing only what the user needs to be able to complete their current task and allow them to enter it in a familiar format and hide all of that cryptic product and account code and all that other stuff that makes QuickBooks work but we also wanted to eliminate any of the communication difficulties so that the delivery driver always has the latest and greatest information as soon as it's available to the main office and so once the data is entered on the iPad everyone has access to the same data the automatic handoff behind the scenes with no manual intervention it we've tremendously reduced the amount of effort involved in recording and fulfilling the orders so I'm going to switch over to filemaker here this time and we're going to take a look at this solution as I said it looks just like the the paper form and the reason I'm showing this in filemaker pro instead of filemaker go is that I can zoom in on it more easily this if for this particular solution we did recommend a stylus to be used with the iPad so that easier to tap on the boxes in the field and it's also easier to collect a signature at the end of this little tour here I'm going to show you we pop up a signature box for the customer and I've tried signing on touch devices before with my fingertip and it just does not feel natural at all since I've been signing my name with a pen for so many years signing with my fingertip just doesn't feel right so a stylus is kind of the perfect hybrid solution there but we also have some automated intelligence built into this form so that if you were to click on one of these gray boxes and put in a quantity it'll tell you that that product is not available in that container size but here we see that we've ordered a two and a half gallon Brazilian coffee chip and all I have to do as the delivery driver to say that I've delivered this product to this customer is check the box and when I do that it automatically updates the the status of my order in the top right so now you can see that my status is delivered and it's yellow telling me that there's something left to do before I leave this customer I also click on this box and I get the signature region where I can then have the user with their stylus sign their name to confirm receipt of the goods that button will then automatically turn green after I've collected the signature telling me that the order is complete and before before I had delivered that item you can see that that box is red so just using immediately recognizable cues in the interface so the user knows what's happening and I'm going to close that and we can hide this and switch back to keynote and now we'll talk about our third case study so SNG seeds SNG seeds is a cut they they're in the field of contract production of seeds from growers to shipment across the Midwest and they've been around for almost a hundred years the now on the third and fourth generations and those family members you can see in the photo there on the right so this is a very big part of who they are as a family and and obviously as an extended family and they were one of the early producers of hybrid hybrid corn in the 1930s and in that in that time this was a transformative technology where they actually took the intentionally cross pollinated different strains of corn so they would get a higher yield in stronger root system which made the plants more resistant to wind and cold and drought and we think about technology today as computers technology then had a very different form and they were really pioneers in the technology in that field of their day and so they've had exposure to technology for many generations and their their general focus is still on coordinating the transfer of inventory from contract growers to buyers they have a network of growers and they just have to make sure that the product gets to the buyers who need those seeds so here's the mechanism that they were using internally to facilitate their order fulfillment and this is the paper form that they would print out for the order in their office and then physically walk it over to the warehouse and one of I believe six warehouses that they have on site and then the warehouse workers would pull the pull the goods off the shelves and load the trucks and mark off what they've collected and bring it back over to the office to say that it's ready to go so there's no validation or enforcement of business rules with paper you can see on this form some of these lines have a dash in them I don't know if that dash means that they found it in inventory or they did not find it in inventory does it need to go on another truck later or was it shipped previously on a different order and luckily when I look a little deeper at this form I can see that that means that they're really just talking about the boxes that they had to use to load the products into and get them onto the trucks so in that case I don't have to worry about the boxes but I kind of would have liked to have known did they really use 10 boxes to load the second stop because I want to keep track of my inventory overall to know is it time to order more boxes and we're not getting that sense of information here for from these paper forms but I also have no idea how many bags are left of any particular seed in any warehouse location so I don't know if there was any damage when we were loading the truck and there's no indication of you know shrinkage of inventory so I also like the technical process that they use here for reordering the stops if you look at stop number one on the left it was originally one they just crossed it out and wrote in the number three and that's how they've rearranged their route for the day so does the office know that they've rearranged their route probably not in this case so those are some of the various challenges that we experienced with paper so the paper-based fulfillment process often delayed order fulfillment by up to a day and a half and that's pretty significant when you're trying to run the such a large organization and the volume that they're dealing with they the process of transferring the forms from the office to the warehouse and back the might have been a good fitness program for the company but definitely wasted a lot of time and now when we get down to the last problem here of accidentally printing two copies of the same order with the high volume of order fulfillment it's easy to miss that you accidentally have two copies and then those two copies get over to the to one of the six warehouses and maybe even went to two different warehouses but then those two orders also got loaded on the trucks and those two trucks then showed up for the same customer with two copies of that delivery but you know two full deliveries that's a pretty costly mistake not just in lost profit but in lost credibility and you know with a family run business credibility is very very important so let's now take a look at this solution if we switch back over to FileMaker we're gonna fill our orders and I'm gonna take a look at this order here just go in and edit my details and I want to show you a little trick that we used here in FileMaker this is a FileMaker go base solution it's intended to be used on the iPad but I'm going to show it here because I think you'll you'll see the trick a little better than you would if I was simply rotating the iPad on the instructions here on the layout we see something that says rotate to enter the pick quantity so this is for the person in the warehouse who's fulfilling the order and they know that they need eight of this particular item so they're gonna go to aisle 717 in the warehouse and they're going to enter how many they they took from that location in the warehouse for that particular lot number and if I was to rotate my iPad I have more width when I go to the landscape view than I do when I'm in the portrait view so what we're looking at now is the portrait view and if I put my cursor over the right side of the window here and I just stretch the window you'll see that this other field this other column just automatic automatically appears on the right-hand side where I can enter additional information so if I was just to rotate the iPad it would pop into place and I would see this extra column and this is how I can cleverly use extra screen real estate for the two different orientations of the iPad and the way we're doing this here is that we're just using one layout and we've anchored the the fields on that rightmost column to the right side of the window and then as the window grows they slide out from under the items that are stacked above them and appear for the users so they can enter the data we've actually done the same thing on the home screen if we go over here you see this the photograph of the farm and as we change the orientation of the iPad we're just showing more or less of that picture by allowing the picture to slide behind these other layout elements so nice little now that may fall under the fun category on the menu screen but on the data entry layout it falls under the productive category because it gives us the ability to show all of the data on a single layout and get different behavior that that's very intuitive to the user so our final case study is penny Newman grain and the penny Newman grain company they've been in business for over 135 years this is a very well established company and they serve farmers and feed manufacturers in the international market for grains and and feed by-products so they have locations in California Tennessee sorry Tennessee Mississippi in Georgia the our specific project was based with the liquid feed division for dairies in California may have more than two million gallons of liquid storage at a bulk cargo terminal so that gives you a sense of the volume that we're dealing with here that's a lot of molasses it's a lot of bitter feed for mixing in with the molasses for our cattle feed but the other industries that they deal with they've done working with by-products if you look at the the rice hulls that is harvested from you know processing the crops that material can actually be used for pillow stuffing and can also be used for powering steam engines so a couple of creative uses of what may have previously been considered waste the walnut shells the the shells themselves can actually be ground down and used as a blast media similar to a sandblasting but it doesn't scratch or pit the surface that they're cleaning and it doesn't cause harmful lung conditions so this organization they've been in business for so long that they can focus on refinement and refinement to get more and more profit and make sure that they're using every possible efficiency to run the organization as whole but they have an extensive storage and transportation network and they've dealt with products ranging from planting seeds all the way down to the trays that are used for drying raisins when after harvesting and their clients obviously have a variety of products and services that they receive from them so our challenge here was to figure out how much to feed the cattle and it doesn't seem like that difficult of a problem I never would have guessed that feeding cows was such a complicated process to start out you just have to know how many cows and how many days and that's pretty easy but then for optimal growth and milk production you have to have a very precise amount of sweetness in the feed mix and if you're mixing powder in with the liquid feed then you get to yet another formula so you may have to pump out some of the feed that's already there remaining in the trough from the last time you were there to fill and mix back in a certain amount of sweet fill a certain amount of bitter fill and get just the right result so when we do that the calculations obviously get much more complicated and these are some of the intermediate calculations showing on the left side of this slide some of the intermediate values that actually go into figuring out the exact ratio that we need for the result so here's where they started when we first started working with them the dealers who visit these individual dairies have a bunch of feed on their trucks and they have to figure out how much to pump into the trough how much sweet how much bitter and how much powder so this is a paper form where obviously they can record all the visits on the same form so this form might sit in a clipboard in the delivery guy's truck calculation errors occurred quite often and they were pretty time consuming to verify but you can see that they've crossed some out and wrote in different numbers and made some notes there but there was no ability to analyze the data or look at any sort of trends and proactively serve the customers and this is actually the best case scenario because oftentimes the delivery drivers didn't write down any information at all they may have done the calculations by hand pumped in the feed they needed and left and didn't write down any of the numbers or if they did write down the numbers it might have been on some sort of scrap of paper that they found in the truck as a receipt from someplace else they had purchased something so the dealers didn't have an actually accurate reflection of what was happening and neither did Penny Newman the parent organization was providing the materials to the dealers so they started losing dealers because this was just such a complex process and they they didn't have any good systems and the dealers were getting frustrated the the technology just wasn't living up to the task so again we turned to file maker pro and file maker and in this case we now have yet another iPad solution and it's distributed to the dealers and these dealers are not employees of Penny Newman so we had to reduce the training burden as much as possible we needed comfortable screens that were going to improve the user acceptance and we wanted the users to be able to just enter a few different measurements and automatically calculate out everything for them to tell them exactly what they needed to pump off from the truck or if they had to pump out the trough and mix in new material this system tells them exactly what to do so the representatives from Penny Newman were able to introduce this system at one of their dealer meetings before they rolled it out to to their entire user base it was enthusiastically welcomed as a differentiator in the market because the handheld technology of the day was seriously lacking and the handheld technology being a calculator that was developed many many years ago this iPad solution is generations beyond what was available to them previously so the they record the measurements locally on the iPad and that gives them the automatic calculation results they need but then we also synchronized their iPad back to the main office using a third-party product called MirrorSync whenever they get a good internet connection so they have this information on their iPad maybe they get back to the office later in the day or they get to a local coffee shop that offers free wi-fi they can synchronize their data back to the main office and everybody has all the information they need they can run proactive trending reports to serve better serve their customers so as a quick review these are the four markets we've talked about ascend aviation the flight and passenger details in the clouds these are the real clouds these are not the the nebulous cloud that's internet-based so recording passenger information and flight information right in the cockpit mcconnell's ice cream doing local deliveries of ice cream getting their signature capture we're needed making sure that the order information is being collected properly and that the information is flowing in real time sng seeds they have trouble overcoming their inventory challenges and making their internal processes much more efficient and preventing duplicate deliveries but then also our last one here penny Newman grain feeding the cattle without a pot a pocket protector that has changed my perception of cattle feed forever so it's a variety of markets and a variety of needs they they all started out with paper and they were all able to eliminate paper improve productivity and increase profits with custom database solutions that were built in filemaker pro and used in filemaker go and filemaker web direct so i'm going to wrap up here with just some information about excelysis and just let you know that we're an international organization we specialize in custom applications for web mobile and desktop deployment whether you're migrating an old system or starting something from scratch we can build it for you or we can help you through the process of building it yourself we work with filemaker pro filemaker go web direct sequel quickbooks integration excel spreadsheets anything you need iphone and ipad integration various databases and web technologies and frameworks and you may have also heard about our our biz tracker solution the original version of the filemaker business tracker was developed by excelysis for filemaker ink back in 2007 hard to believe that that was seven years ago but for the release of filemaker pro seven and it's a good fit for small and mid-sized organizations who sell any type of product or service and it's a robust scalable filemaker solution with multi-user access and it can easily be modified and adapted to any business need we also pride ourselves on giving development community community free trips and tips and tricks we have various articles and demos on our website so feel free to check them out at excelysis.com and i want to thank you all for your time today and mark i'll hand the reins back to you thank you so much that was a a wonderful presentation on your four customer business use cases very nice job all right so for the remainder of the time we're going to answer some of the questions that you've been submitting to our online chat before we jump into the q and a portion on the screen now you see a couple filemaker resources i get a chance right down these urls this is a great area to go and get more information about filemaker especially if you enjoyed what you saw today we do have more customer success stories out there like the ones you heard today from from dug so please go check those out and every week we have new web seminars just like the paper replacement webinar that you attended today and of course the last url that i'll mention is the training resources especially for the new folks that are new to the filemaker world we've got a section called filemaker training series and there's some online training that you could take advantage of for free filemaker training series basics it's a way to download and really learn on your own if that's what you'd like to do all right let's jump into the q and a section and i'm gonna have dug and team help me out with some of the answers to these questions okay first question that came up for barcode scanning do we need to purchase a scanner or can i use our ipad with filemaker go um so good question filemaker go does have built-in barcode scanning you can use it on the ipad or the iphone we have clients using that successfully today and in one environment where it's a inventory warehousing or sorry warehouse inventory solution where they audit the inventory works very well it all depends on the volume of barcodes that you want to scan and what sort of uh you know how fast you have to be able to do that devices that are optimized for barcode scanning will obviously give you results faster than a built-in camera in the ipad or the iphone but it can be done straight in ios devices using filemaker go thanks dog next question does the filemaker connection to quickbooks allow you to write data both ways example from filemaker to quickbooks and vice versa absolutely this um this q odbc product is available in two different flavors so you can use you can purchase the read-only version and the read-only version comes um free with quickbooks enterprise but if you buy it as an add-on you can get the read-write version so you can push and pull um it absolutely does work both ways next question where can we find industry specific templates well i'll take that question dog um i'm going to point you guys to filemaker.com under solutions made for filemaker section and you could query it by specific industry another idea is filemaker out of the box comes with about 16 starter solutions now so if you're you're looking just to get started with filemaker and you want to manage certain aspects like your contacts your inventory we've got starter solutions where we've kind of done the work for you but you could also customize these templates as well so those are two ideas that you could take away regarding industry specific type templates next question for security concerns can filemaker go connect to servers that are behind a firewall yes and it's just a matter of properly configuring the firewall so filemaker uses port 5003 as long as you open port 5003 and allow that to push through your firewall and directly to your filemaker server then your outside traffic can come in directly without using a vpn vpn is obviously another option you can have them join the network and then just use internal communication within the firewall to allow that connectivity as well great and doug this question is specifically about your four business use cases do all of your solutions use a central server did you have any problems with offline access when the ipad user has poor or limited connection great question and actually the fourth one doesn't does not connect live to the hosted server because these dairy farms were in such remote areas and some of them did not have good enough internet the other three case studies do connect to the live server so we didn't have to worry about any synchronization issues but for offline connectivity with the penny Newman solution we are using mirror sync to collect the data locally that's collecting the data is all just done with vanilla filemaker features and then we use mirror sync to replicate the data to the back office once we get the connectivity we need okay great next question can you please share more details and how to capture a handwritten signature on the ipad yeah that's just said as an input type on a container field that in filemaker pro you just say that you want that to be a signature field so you can insert that and once they click into the field just right with what the with a stylus or a fingertip and it's just it's stored as a graphic perfect and for folks on the phone we've got a webinar called introduction to filemaker where a sales rep like myself will go ahead and build a solution in filemaker pro extended out to the ipad and show you how to build in that signature capture for your mobile device it's actually very easy to use and to create next question for data captured in the field on an ipad without a mobile data plan will the real real-time data be sent back to the office the next time a wife get wi-fi connection is made and will and will that update the collected data in the office so that seems like a sync question than me doc why don't you go ahead and take that yeah it's um it doesn't happen automatically as soon as you connect the um the the actual experience there is that once you get the connection back the um the user would click a button that says that they explicitly want to synchronize the information and that'll do the the bidirectional data transfer once they start that scripted process and um then we take the information that was entered in the field push it back to the server but then we can also take some information that was collected in the main office and push it down to the remote device as well to let them know that they may have a new stop that just came in was added to their route and they have to change where they're going next so it doesn't happen as soon as you plug in it doesn't happen as soon as you get a wi-fi connection but if the user clicks the button then the automated process takes care of it great and doc let me actually throw in just a a little bit additional information on that um it's always based your your synchronization or your connection methodology it's always based on not only your need but also your look your locale um in many of our solutions we're connecting directly to the server over a cellular connection on the on the ipad in some cases we're we're using a synchronized so that we have offline access and it is based on on how frequently you need to get the information and then obviously if you have a wi-fi or cellular capabilities out in the particular field in the situation with penny newman for example uh because these are dealers who don't actually work for they're not employees of penny newman the dealers are responsible for getting their own ipad they're responsible for their own data plans and and things of that nature and of course as i've said you know they're going out to cattle farms where you in many cases in california you know you do still have a pretty good cellular coverage but you are in the middle of uh you don't necessarily have a great signal so the need there was was more important for them to be able to capture the data and they didn't really need any sort of real-time capability so they were able to you know do what they need to do capture the data do their calculations and everything go on to the next field repeat it and then when they get back to the office or a coffee shop or home or or what have you they can just synchronize at that point and and be ready to go and that way everything is updated and that was again all based on the particular need of the project and also the the locale and the technology that they had available thank you next question can excel assist share any information on time frame for these solutions from meeting with the client to finish solution and my guess is all four were probably different time frame so Doug why don't you maybe explain that actually actually well it um i'll i'll jump in on one and i'm going to hand it off to kristo to finish with the rest but on the first one ascend aviation i mentioned that brian did a little bit of the development work himself and um you know he loves file maker it loves developing a file maker it was a lot of fun for him but the entire process of building his first solution and then redeveloping his two initial solutions and consolidating them into one and getting that all bundled up in an ipad friendly interface we spent in total less than 50 hours on development throughout the span of the work that we did with him so for time on the books with ascend aviation we're at under 50 hours and kristo you want to talk about some of the others yeah i'll talk specifically a little about penny newman penny newman was an interesting case because they had approached us about a year ago with this concept the company decided they want to branch out and do something new and different but the proof of concept that was originally designed i think we spent somewhere around 75 hours and then the project got poo pooed by corporate and then a year later they came back and they wanted to continue on with the production of once they started realizing they were having issues with dealers i think but once in time with the proof of concept was finished and it was completed i think we had it done with a matter of a couple of months um as far as s and g uh that's been an ongoing perfecting process um and i'm a conals would you spend on that one i think that took you initially what about two or three weeks about the initial concept though once you figure out yeah mcconnell's was uh that was a fun project for me because i might i have a lot of experience with quickbooks integrations in general and i've done that for over 10 years now so personally i really wanted to get involved in the project i loved the opportunity to work with the odbc and this different way of integrating with quickbooks and um i'm pretty sure we have less than 25 hours on the books with mcconnell's one point two and one make about all of these um case studies that we've shown here um which is a big key factor for a lot of people uh considering going paperless these are task specific solutions that we've done these were designed so that the tasks at hand and organized um and that that plays a huge role we have a lot of people who've come to us clients and prospects who think that the requirement is to change their entire solution needs to be mobile based or web based and that's not necessarily the case every time we have found through uh our our method of assessment and our agile development that we segment out or task orient those those case studies those those features those functionalities for people to use so they're not having to develop an entire solution that needs to be broadcast out or run remotely so to speak the other thing too is that a lot of these solutions once are deployed you know the people that have the vision uh it's a 55th relationship we have with our client we bring the technology and the experience to know how but they bring their business to us and one of the key factors on all these solutions is they have an idea of what things they want to do we have a way of making it work but when we collaborate and as this process unfolds as you introduce different types of users who think differently or who actually are more involved with the day-to-day tasks there has been perfecting and tweaking and polishing done so you're never going to always hit on the park right out of the gate so these have all been through a process of back and forth usage any Newman stuff out in the field having dealers deal with it how they use it what what issues they came across till we came to a perfect solution so they it's like any software you're going to go through your alpha your data then your final yeah and the collaboration is key in that process it's it's huge to work with work with the client as a partner in their business guys thank you for the explanation we have time for one more question less one is can filemaker 13 print out barcodes as well as reading them uh yeah printing barcodes there are a variety of different ways of dealing with that it could be as simple as just getting the right font there are mac and windows fonts available for barcodes that code 39 or code 128 different barcode technologies as long as you have that font on your system and you're printing it from filemaker pro then all you really need to do is go in a number or a string of text on screen and format it with the right font it'll come out looking exactly like the barcode that you would expect if you're doing it from an ipad you can't load the fonts on there as easily so you could either offload that to the to the server or one of the office users or there's a third party tool for creating barcodes using web viewers the other possibilities that we have a tip file on the excel assist dot com website about creating a code 39 barcode just using repeating fields in filemaker so there are a variety of different ways to do that and we'd be happy to help anyone with implementing that in their own solution excellent well thank you again everybody for attending our webinar and we'll see you soon thank you again