Practical Ideas for Spending “Use It or Lose It” Budget in 2020

Whew!  It’s almost over.  This unprecedented year of 2020 may never see a rival in our lifetimes.  However, as we discussed in last month’s Cincom Smalltalk Digest, not everything that’s come out of the pandemic has been bad. One surprising thing that companies may be experiencing is a surplus in “use it or lose it” budget. With “work from home” orders given around the world and more companies shifting to an online workplace, there has been a decrease in spending, which has produced some cost savings for a lot of companies.  Why not use those savings for something that could benefit you and jumpstart good things for your company in 2021?

Adam Beck, Director of Marketing at CADENAS PARTsolutions, encourages companies to:

“Invest in your people. ‘Tis the season for thankfulness, generosity and giving. Your team supports you year round. Show them they’re appreciated with some small tokens of gratitude. If your company permits it and you can shuffle some miscellaneous expense dollars around, get creative and pass out movie tickets, gift cards or bottles of wine to your team. It will go a long way and be money well spent.”

The end of the year can be stressful for many families as they plan for the holidays, but for business owners, it’s even more stressful trying to close deals and plan for the following year. Adam goes on to talk more specifically about investments companies can make at the end of the year that can be used for delivery at a later date.  In fact, listen to what Adam suggests:

“… Look for opportunities to spend your extra budget on services that you can utilize when things free up. Think about it as a sort of layaway for the future. … One of my favorite ‘Layaway’ spend items is banking a little maintenance time with my various providers. This way I have already budgeted the funds if I need help. … I can bank some hours with vendors now for future use, so there’s no need to scramble to find the funds when I need them the most.”

As a Cincom Smalltalk customer or partner, we want to introduce several ways that you can create a “layaway” with us—wisely investing in the success of your company or application, while planning for the future. Consider this to be similar to an insurance plan. If something happens to your application and you want a proof of concept or need a specialized fix, you’ve already paid for that access and can pull from it without having to go through a new approval and justification process.

For some ideas, this “layaway” can be used for things like:

• Product Upgrades
  Don’t risk a critical upgrade to a learn-as-you-go, in-house approach. Our senior consultants know the small, impossible-to-document steps that make the difference between an unresolved task and a completed process.
• Performance Enhancement
  A performance-enhancement service reveals how a team is using Cincom Smalltalk, which aspects of the tool they are not using and how they could energize so many more existing capabilities.
• Troubleshooting
  Whether it’s identifying and resolving a processing glitch or improving a performance drag, we have experts who can work with you remotely and/or on-site to re-create the problem and then provide an alternative viable approach.
• Mentoring
  It’s easy to learn the basics of installing and using Cincom Smalltalk. But the most productive use is best achieved through customized mentoring for your experience level, developed to meet your needs.
• Migrations
  Cincom Services can move your application suite to the most productive Cincom Smalltalk programming environment, giving you fully scalable, web-based and client-server development enhancements.
• Proof of Concept
  Not sure if Cincom® ObjectStudio® or Cincom® VisualWorks® is the tool you need? An on-site proof of concept that uses your data and meets your business goals will provide that last element of confirmation.

Suzanne Fortman, the Cincom Smalltalk Program Director and Engineering Manager, recently discussed this valuable topic fresh from a customer meeting. Watch Suzanne’s interview here.