Smalltalk Digest: April Edition

Welcome to the April 2018 edition of the Cincom Smalltalk™ Digest.  In this edition, Arden Thomas continues his DomainMaster Hidden Gems series and we go into detail about our Partner Promotion Program. Check it out below:

Hidden Gems: Change/Loop Solution

Contribution from Arden Thomas, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager

The purpose of the Hidden Gems Screencast is to give developers who use Cincom Smalltalk some valuable insight into useful abilities of the products that may not be obvious.  For this month’s edition, Arden continues with the series on DomainMaster. To recap this series, DomainMaster is a framework that supports modular application construction and reuse.  You can learn more here.

In this new gem on a Change/Loop Solution, Arden provides a solution to an issue that can cause infinite loops from the change/update mechanism used in DomainMaster.

You can watch the video below:

If you have any questions, please send them or other comments and suggestions to athomas@cincom.com.  Thanks!

Cincom Smalltalk Stories

Each Thursday, we highlight a different Cincom Smalltalk story on Facebook and Twitter using the trending hashtag #ThursdayThoughts. Throughout the month of March, we highlighted:

• March 1 – Mobile App Development for Apple® Products and Android™ Using Cincom Smalltalk
• March 8 – HTS Delivers a Custom-Built, Web-Based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Application with Cincom Smalltalk
• March 15 – Cincom Smalltalk Delivers Web Application for Event Management
• March 22 – With Cincom Smalltalk, EBC Informatique Quickly Enhances and Improves TotalHorizon, while Maintaining Optimal Pricing and Providing Customers with Quick Implementation
• March 29 – Cincom Smalltalk Lets Penn State Roll Out Web-based Access without Losing Legacy System Investments

Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for these and other updates throughout the month.

Cincom Smalltalk Partner Promotion Program

We understand that it can be difficult for a lot of our partners and customers to market their applications on their own. The cost of marketing products and services to potential customers can often be more than they can afford. However, marketing is such a critical piece to the success of their business. That’s why the Cincom Smalltalk STAR team offers to our current customers and partners the opportunity to assist them in marketing their applications or services. This assistance is one of many benefits that come with being a customer or partner with Cincom and adds value by helping to grow their respective brands and increase the usage of their Cincom Smalltalk applications.

How It Works

We make this process simple and easy for our partners and customers by providing a brief, online survey that gathers information about their application and its usage. We then create a story that can be used on multiple channels to market their applications or services. In addition, the user story is posted to the Cincom Smalltalk website and our social media sites, which gives them and their application even more exposure.

When a customer completes the online survey, we’re able to take the information they provide and work with them to find out more details they may have left on the table. We do this by asking them questions about their market they sometimes don’t know.  For example, we work with quite a few one- and two-person shops that might have initially developed their application because it seemed cool or was a missing piece they discovered in an existing program. We help them discover their “secret sauce” and determine which markets to promote their new solution to. In our simple survey, they’re usually able to answer the majority of the questions. However, the last few questions are ones that we’re able to work with them on to discover the “who, what, how and why” that would help them take their cool idea and turn it into a successful solution. This is all part of the service we provide to Cincom Smalltalk customers and partners to build their business.

Examples

If you would like to see a few examples of how this works, check out the following user stories:

• Adventure World German Language
• AR CAD LLC
• Digital Design Solutions LLC
• HTS Engineering

Are You Ready to Take Your Business to the Next Level?

All businesses start somewhere.  A few of the stories referenced above are describing well-established organizations. But many of our customers and partners started with an application they either made on their own time or with limited resources at their disposal.  In the Mobile App Development for Apple® Products and Android™ Using Cincom Smalltalk story above, David Buck of Siberon said:

“I was chatting with Suzanne Fortman before the OOPLUCON conference and asked how Simberon could get Cincom support for the mobile game I was developing when it was far too early at that time to negotiate a VAR license. She suggested the new REV Program, so I decided to purchase it right away.” 

Just like David, you have an opportunity to use Cincom Smalltalk to grow your business. Here is a valuable opportunity to partner with us, be innovative and rev up your business to the next level using Cincom Smalltalk!  Join the Rev Program―a  quick, easy way to partner with us and grow your business with a limited Value Added License Agreement. At only $500, it’s a great investment that could pay big dividends as you grow your business. Plus, this program gives you all the benefits of being a customer with us.

Don’t let another day go by. Let’s grow your business together:

• GET the Limited Value Added License – $500 

“How Do I … ?” Frequently Asked Questions

The Cincom Smalltalk Product Team fields questions from partners, customers and users of Cincom Smalltalk about a number of topics concerning our products. Some of these include topics about customer orders, product installation and website navigation among others. In order to provide a better user experience, we have created a “How Do I … ?” frequently asked questions knowledge base on our website. To check out the growing archive of these questions, click here.

E-ONE Improves Efficiency with Cincom CPQ™

E-ONE is a leading fire apparatus manufacturer, making emergency vehicles, rescue trucks, aerial fire trucks and rescue pumpers. Part of the REV Group, E-ONE is one of the largest manufacturers of fire rescue vehicles in the United States, with more than 23,000 vehicles in operation around the world. They are the industry leader in product innovations and exceeding customer expectations—all of which began with its EzDRAW, EzONE, EzWRITER and EzONE2go product configurators, based on Cincom technology.

The need for a versatile configure-price-quote (CPQ) solution was born out of the company’s increasingly complex product offerings; E-ONE’s emergency vehicles can have up to 14,000 customizable features. As a result, E-ONE was challenged with producing accurate quotes and orders that required significant amounts of resources and cost. E-ONE did not have structured processes for product definition and the release of new features. Dealers could “write in” their interpretations of an order, including instructions to the shop floor. This technique made systemic bill of material (BOM) determinations next to impossible.

E-ONE began implementation of its EzONE product configurator, based on Cincom CPQ, resulting in a marked improvement. Now, instead of an error-prone process that took days, customers can order highly customized fire rescue vehicles in minutes.

“Cincom CPQ has put us in a strategically well-placed position.”

– Jonathan Plant, Configuration Manager, E-ONE

To learn about Cincom’s CPQ solution and how E-ONE implemented it, visit http://bit.ly/2HwKtp9

How Cincom Helped WPSIC Improve the Claims Experience

When the TRICARE division of Wisconsin Physicians Service Insurance Corporation (WPSIC) decided to upgrade its document communications system to the Cincom Eloquence® product, they were confident they would realize immediate, tangible benefits. Quickly they were able to reduce the average time to process a customer-service request from 6½ minutes to 5 minutes, streamline processing of outbound communications to 90 percent same-day turnaround and improve accuracy levels of communication with customer members and providers to 99 percent. And now, with a host of new functionality available with Cincom’s latest release of the Eloquence solution—including an even more robust authoring environment for document creation—WPSIC is poised to see additional improvements in quality, productivity and operating costs.

“Our ultimate goal is to provide clear, accurate, actionable communications.  We want to speed the claims process and provide a timely customer service experience. With Cincom as our partner, we know we will consistently be advancing document communications workflow and techniques relative 
to these objectives.”

– Dave True, Director of Customer Service for WPSIC’s TRICARE division

To learn more about Cincom Eloquence and how WPSIC used it to improve their claims experience, visit http://bit.ly/2vpIMFq.