Is the juice worth the squeeze?
How much information do you get out of the
data you gather?
 At larryroof.com, our specialty is helping your company get the most out of the data that flow through your organization. To many, this can easily be misconstrued as "so you write reports." That would be akin to saying that doctors solely help their patients by "writing prescriptions." While in the end, we may in fact write some reports, as in the end doctors may write prescriptions, it is the analysis and understanding of what is going on before all of this occurs that sets larryroof.com apart from the rest.
An example of how we work can be seen in a large food processing company that we recently helped. They were struggling with their operations on a number of fronts, from purchasing and receiving raw materials, to producing and packaging their product, to monitoring their production facilities, controlling their inventories, taking orders, coordinating shipping, and forecasting future needs.
When we were first brought in, we started where we always do, learning the client's business. This is one of our most basic guidelines. If you don't understand someone's business, you can't help them solve their problems. Yet the vast majority of consulting companies completely ignore this fact. All they want is a specification to work against, and nothing more.
After gaining an understanding of the client's operations, we turned our attention to the data that was presently flowing through the client's organization. What we found was alarming. There was an enormous amount of data being gathered, but hardly any viable information being produced. Internally we refer to this as "Is the juice worth the squeeze?" What we mean by this simple question is this: Is all of the effort that you go through to obtain, gather, and store data, worth the amount of information you get in return?
This company was by no means atypical. Almost every one of our clients to some degree struggle with either what data to gather, how to manage the data that they collect, or how to turn their data into beneficial information. In the end, we changed some processes, added some others, optimized the way data flowed through their organization, and yes, even wrote some reports. But now they were meaningful, focused, timely reports.
So ask yourself this about your information systems: Are you getting the most that you can out of your data? You can be certain that with any solution developed by larryroof.com, the juice is going to be worth the squeeze.
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How much time do you spend staying
current?
What is the shelf life on your
current technical skills?
 For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the
profession we are in changes constantly. New technologies are introduced daily. In fact, the tech
industry is so prolific, that you could spend all of your time investigating new products,
concepts and ideas and still not know everything that is going on.
If you don’t keep up with these new technologies, your value in the industry over time will
decrease. That’s right, by simply doing nothing, you will be left behind. Suddenly you will find
yourself knowing a whole lot about something no one cares about anymore.
So what are you to do? First and foremost, it is your responsibility to stay current - no one
else’s. Now ideally you would like to work in a situation where your employer gives you the
opportunities to gain new knowledge on the job. By all means you should look for such companies
to work for.
Failing that, you have to make the commitment to yourself that you are going to stay current.
This means you have to regularly allocate time to this task. You are in an industry where your
value is based in a large part on the depth and breath of your knowledge in current industry
technologies. Second, you are going to have to narrow down this industry to something that is
manageable for an individual to consume. You can’t know everything, so you are going to have to
be selective and make some calculated choices as to both what interests you and what you think
will be in demand in the future.
Staying current does three things for you. First, it keeps your finger on the virtual pulse of
the industry. Second, it keeps you excited about what you do for a living, and that is where you
need to be emotionally to be truly successful. Third, it gives you a broad foundation of
knowledge from which to draw upon when designing new systems.
At larryroof.com we demand that our employees spend time every day staying current with new
technologies. We take time out of each business day to discuss new topics that our employees
present; everything from hardware, to software, to third-party components and tools, to code
techniques, to totally unrelated topics from other industries that employees believe play into
business we are working on or are considering working in. It’s an investment that we greatly
value. It’s one of the many key assets that sets us apart from the rest and makes us a truly
unique consulting firm.
larryroof.com - spending the time to stay current.
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Taking your business mobile
Do you have data where you want it,
when you want it, and how you want it? 
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Our mission statement is "Taking your business mobile." Now some people might think that in our
case mobile refers solely to the consulting work that we do in handheld applications. While we
are one of the premier firms in this field, our definition of mobile includes not only handheld,
but also web-based and desktop. Mobile to us means gathering data from wherever it may be and
getting it to wherever it needs to be, when you need it.
But we take it a step further. We give you the information you need to make your business better.
Unlike other firms that are caught up solely in the technology, we focus on the business.
Because, after all, that is what it is all about.
You will see this difference in everything we do, from the way we interact with you, to the way
we work to understand your business, to the solutions we create. We take an active involvement in
where you are going, what you are trying to accomplish and most importantly, how we can help you
get there.
For us to be able to work this way, we had to create a different type of consulting firm. One
that is both business and technologically savvy. On our staff you will find people that have
skill sets that are broad and deep. People that understand the bits and bytes as well as the
dollars and cents.
larryroof.com - taking your business mobile.
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Case Study: Handling Your Logistics
Would you trust just anyone to
coordinate your mission-critical operations?
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A few years ago, we here at larrryroof.com were approached by a major shipping company to help
them with some logistical issues that they had at their air hub. They needed to track packages as
they passed through their hub quickly, flawlessly, and efficiently.
Now for those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to step inside and see the inter-workings of
a shipping company’s air hub during what I would describe as their “rush hour”, it is a sight to
be seen. Within a matter of a few hours in the middle of the night, a whole fleet of cargo planes
arrive from various parts of the country, these planes are quickly unloaded, all of their
contents sorted and routed to the appropriate outbound planes, where they are loaded and whisked
away a few short hours later. This happens every night, night after night.
Where larryroof.com came in was to provide a system that scanned every package as it passed
through, recording what container each package went in, and what plane the container was loaded
onto. All of this happened in a wireless environment, realtime, with fail-over support for
situations where devices were outside of wireless coverage.
We started by visiting the client’s air hub in the middle of the night, during their “rush hour”
to see how their business worked. We took along video cameras so that we could capture details of
the operation for later review with our complete design team. We watch every part of their
operation. We asked lots of questions of everyone involved.
Next, we took all of this information back to our office, worked through it with our design team,
and then went back to our client, this time during the day to discuss our understanding about
their operations. We found out what we had right, what we had wrong and what we didn’t know yet.
All of this information was added to what we already had, rounding out the picture for us of how
their operations worked.
This is a perfect example of how larryroof.com is vastly different from all software companies
and most consulting firms. Rather than depending solely on the specs that the client sends, we
prefer to spend the time at the client’s site, watching how they work and questioning them on why
things are the way the are and how things work.
In the case of this solution, we developed a handheld-based system running on a wireless
infrastructure. The software on the devices was designed to update itself automatically, so that
it would always be up to date, a feature of products developed by larryroof.com. Devices would
continue to scan even if they could not get a wireless connection, but would then send all of
their buffered scans just as soon as they could reestablish a network connection, another
trademark of a larryroof.com product. The system has continued to run, night in, night out, year
after year - just the way we like it, and what you should expect nothing less then.
When you are looking for someone to build the systems that you are going to risk your business on
you need to call larryroof.com at 888-449-8720.
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How flexible are your systems?
Could you easily change your
information system to meet new business needs?
Ask yourself this. When your business needs change, as your business grows, as you enter new
markets, when you need to see new or different views of information about your business, can your
existing systems easily change to meet your needs?
Chances are that they can't. The reason is simple. Most software companies build only what is
asked of them and nothing more. You give them a spec. They build some software. They don't take
the time to learn about your company, to factor in where your company is going, and because of
this, they fail to make your systems flexible enough to accommodate your future needs.
At larryroof.com we assume that your business is going to change. In fact, we plan for it from
the very first time we meet with you. In every step we take in creating your systems, from
design, to development, through implementation, we factor in flexibility. So as you grow, you can
rest assured that the systems designed for you by larryroof.com will grow with you.
For more information on how we can create systems that grow with you call us at 888-449-8720
today.
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