JOHN GRADY INC.'S JOBBER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (JMS) . . .
What is Jobber Management System(JMS)?
Offshore Programming Services from India...
Is JMS an Accounting Solution??
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John Grady,
President of John Grady, Inc. A self-made man, committed
to providing quality service to his clients. Now based in Chestertown in upstate New York, John Grady is better known to his clients as the man who has been delivering quality and high-performance software services for the past 20 years. John has developed, supported and enhanced the well-known Jobber Management System (JMS) for fuel oil and LP gas distributors. The level of trust and comfort that John’s clients have in him is commendable. Very few software providers can claim to have achieved this!
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JMS, as it stands today, is a software business solution for fuel oil and LP gas distributors. JMS was first developed on Wang2200, then ported to Niakwa’s Basic2C on the SuperDOS operating system. JMS has been acclaimed to be a very reliable, fast and accurate system. It has been continuously enhanced over the years – making it faster and superior to other competing products. John developed his own unique database management system to ensure that the system does what it is supposed to... and fast!!
JMS has a very powerful customer tracking system. It keeps track of a customer’s gas requirements by capturing weather conditions; extrapolates this into usage at each customer installation and then forecasts the next delivery for a customer site by automatically generating a delivery ticket. Dispatching is thus greatly simplified by JMS. This strong dispatching interface is complemented by Receivables tracking. The outstanding position of any customer can be retrieved with the flick of a button.
John Grady, Inc., customized the Wang’s accounting solution, General Business System (GBS), for its clients. More importantly, an interface was built between GBS and JMS.. This allows the fuel oil and LP gas companies to maintain and update their accounts in the required fashion. General Ledger, Accounts Payables, Inventory, and PayRoll are some of the popular modules of GBS.
This is a question that most clients did not ask John Grady. They were extremely content with JMS as it stood. But the Year 2000 loomed ahead. Y2K, as the Year 2000 problem is affectionately referred to in the IT industry, soon became a very real issue. As with most proprietary and legacy products, the next question was imminent. ... revamp or rewrite?
John has a very unique solution to the Y2K problem in JMS. The product can be made Y2K compliant. But is that the answer? A solution such as JMS was apt in the era that it was created. The mini-frame era. Wang computers, as we all know, are considered obsolete. Does it really make sense to enhance and support a system on such a platform? Is it worth the effort to encourage the users to expand their businesses in today’s world using yesterday’s hardware? JMS meets every promise as a business solution ... but features such as sharing of data between JMS and other applications, like Microsoft Office, are just not possible. Graphs and spreadsheets in JMS? These will remain a dream on the current hardware platform.
The world has moved ahead and high-performance and cost-effective machines are now available in the form of PCs. PCs and Microsoft products go hand in hand. The world of Windows ...
It soon became clear that although a Y2K solution for JMS is a real and tangible solution, and will be offered to all current users, it is not the better of the two available alternatives. That’s where we came into the picture...
Offshore Programming Services from India...
John did not need any convincing that an Object-Oriented Approach must be used to rewrite and re-engineer JMS. He was already becoming an expert in this approach by the time we chanced upon each other over the Internet. An intense meeting of 12 continuous hours at his Friends Lake office made John Grady a believer that Perfect Paradigm could indeed help him take the first few positive steps towards rebuilding JMS.
We then embarked on an even more grueling journey as we took JMS apart and put it back together again. Rational Rose’s Visual Modeler. ERWin. James Rumbaugh. Jacobson. Grady Booch. Object Modeling Technology. Unified Modeling Language. All these soon became an intrinsic part of our daily lives for 4 weeks as JMS – the Object Model slowly evolved. John’s knowledge of JMS, his clients’ business, his experience and his vision coupled with our technical skills in Object-Oriented Modeling complemented each other perfectly as we created synergies together.
As the model took shape, it became increasingly clear that JMS is an Accounting Solution!
Is JMS an Accounting Solution??
JMS has always been believed to be a vertical market application. Its focus was on dispatching, tracking of receivables, forecasting, scheduling of deliveries ... how could it be an accounting solution? Prior to our involvement in the project, John had evaluated over 30 business accounting products that are available in the market today, with the objective of interfacing his new JMS to the one that passed his stringent quality test. But it was a search in vain. Well, not entirely. It convinced John that he must develop his own Accounting Product that would complement and fit in with JMS totally. We affirmed his view.
It was a mixed surprise when the new JMS model glared back the fact that JMS is indeed nothing but a very industry specific Accounting Solution. It is not a secret that every aspect of a business has an accounting impact; so this revelation should not have come as much of a surprise. But the line of thinking till date has always been JMS as a distinct system from GBS – where GBS took care of the Debits and Credits and the required financial reporting after receiving the inputs from JMS.
This philosophy has now undergone a radical change. JMS is an integrated accounting solution with clear functional areas that map onto accounting functions. But then again, the scope of the new JMS does not end there ... every aspect of JMS, as it is stands today, will be incorporated into the new JMS. Accounting and accounting entries will be a fallout of each transaction .... whether a purchase, a delivery, a sale, an inventory transfer, a payment, a refund.
Accounting will no longer be an after-thought. With the new JMS, management will always know its position vis-a-vis profitability at any point in time. The accounts will always reflect the real-time picture. Away with clumsy interfaces between systems developed and implemented differently. With the new JMS, there is no interface – it is all tightly integrated.
The new JMS is more than just a rewrite of the the current system. It has been carefully designed. Object-oriented technology makes the new product more robust. The working model of the new JMS has been able to absorb many extreme conditions and situations that would have seemed impossible to do with the existing product. This has been a heartening experience indeed and has re-affirmed our faith in Object-Oriented Modeling.
The new product is being developed on a Windows platform. It will run on high-end PCs such as PCs with Pentium processors. This product will be a highly scalable product ... for installations as small as 500 customer-base to as large as 100,000 customers initially, and with minor enhancements many times this number when the first multi-state distributor becomes reality. It is being developed such that it can be a solution for a single-user installation or over a wide-area network or a dial-up network.
The new JMS will have a better and visually improved user interface. It will have the same look and feel as that of Microsoft products. It will be tightly integrated with Microsoft Office 97. Generation of custom letters using the JMS customer database and Microsoft’s Word will be a breeze with the new product. Swapping data between JMS and Excel spreadsheets will be a cakewalk.
The new JMS is currently under development as a corroborative effort between John Grady Incorporated and our offshore staff from Mumbai, India. We have a dedicated team that will be working full-time on this project for the next nine months. This team will live, breathe and dream JMS! The new JMS will be available by summer of ’98.
Perfect Paradigm is committed to the new JMS and John Grady’s vision for the next generation complete business solution for fuel oil and LP gas distributors. The content of this page were composed by Perfect Paradigm.
