Normally, for instance, new bike sales and accessories sales went up and down together, and if one of the two had fallen off alone, you could bet that Boland would demand a reason. If nothing else, computers, by making past information available more quickly, could help him sniff out trouble.
Computerizing, he saw a micro as one way to avoid greedy consultants and their expensive recommendations.
“I’ve seen too many instances,” said Boland, “where businesses paid out $50,000, $60,000 to a consultant who spent six or seven months analyzing computer requirements. Then he’d recommend $50,000 or $150,000 worth of computer equipment.” Boland wanted the benefits of the bigger machines without the costs. His goal was to reach the point that a somewhat larger competitor in the D.C. area already had; the rival owned an IBM 34 system with a six-digit price.
“He used to work for IBM fifteen or twenty years ago, before he went into the motorcycle business,” Boland said. “He now has just about every one of his salespeople on commission, and he knows exactly what they sell every day. He can tell you where each motorcycle, each piece of inventory, is.
“He can tell you whether it’s in a truck, what color it is, where it is, what stage of preparation it’s in for delivery. He puts his purchases in the computer with an inventory program. The moment a salesman sells a cycle, the register itself deducts it from inventory. It’s a point-of-sales system. So theoretically, at the end of the day he knows exactly what he started the day with, what he sold, what he added to it, and what the bottom-line figure is. We’d love to get to that point.
“The likelihood of this happening with us, though, is very low. I don’t know if all this detail is necessary. And our business is seasonal, and I don’t want too much cash tied up in the system. And what’s the sense of keeping instant track of every nut and bolt sold? But we’d love to get the major items in on computer. The motorcycles, for instance. They can easily sell for up to $6,000 apiece, so it’s worth it.
“It’s a question of software. This competitor has spent more than $100,000 to develop specific software to get what he wants. Now if you’ve got $100,000 to throw away and want to hire a programmer full time at, say, 0,000 a year, that’s fine. Most companies like us can’t afford that.”
So Boland bought several programs off the shelf from Clinton Computers, including Accounting Plus, which he began trying to use as an electronic general ledger. He ran it on a North Star computer with a 5-megabyte hard disk—a memory device capable of stashing away the equivalent of maybe 2,500 typed pages of information. The North Star system was just a way for him to get his feet wet in computing with a general-ledger program. Boland, though, would switch computers even sooner than expected. The system’s memory space wouldn’t suffice for the records of his miniconglomerate, and it wasn’t easily expandable. And he would have trouble getting the machine repaired as quickly as he needed. Clinton Computers, however good its service department, just could not respond fast enough to suit his requirements.
And the software seemed just as major a disappointment, what with the need for complicated customization.
“The biggest problem I ran into at the store,” he said of the hardware and software, “was ‘We’re going to sell you a system that we think will do the job, but not necessarily so.’”