Q3. What's happened in between?
We started by selling critical chain software that ran on top of Microsoft Project, along with training. Early on we worked with a lot of consultants, especially Goldratt associates. They would sell the implementation and the company would buy our software and bring us in to do the software training. The good news was, it was a great way to learn what worked and what didn't. I much prefer learning from other people's mistakes. The bad news was that we saw the same mistakes being made over and over, often by the same people. You may think it's hard to get people who work for you to change, but believe me, it's almost impossible to get consultants to change when they bring you in. By early 1998 we knew that we had to go into the implementation business ourselves. That was a big decision, because it meant that we were in direct competition with many of our software distributors. Most of those relationships went away, not always without pain, and since then we've done our own sales and distribution, with the help of Alan Cohen in the U.K.
Few remember that our original name was "Creative Technology Labs." It wasn't a very inspired name, and also we kept getting calls from people who had problems with their Soundblaster cards because Soundblaster was made by Creative Labs. So we changed to ProChain Solutions in 1999.
Over the last 10 years we've developed and fine-tuned our methodology, "ProChain Project Management," the subject of The Billion Dollar Solution. We're working on version 10 of the ProChain software, which includes ProChain Project Scheduling for single projects; ProChain Pipeline for multiple projects; and ProChain Enterprise for web-based scheduling, updating, reporting, and analysis. We've also done successful implementations with a number of very large companies.
We've tried to stay tapped into what's going on with the TOC world, but we've had little contact with Goldratt or his organizations for years. I think that has worked in our favor, because in the TOC world there are too many things that people feel a need to do "because Eli said so."
