Further, I have saved quite a bit of time in expense report preparation from the business miles and expenses I can easily note on my calendar and money management applications on my handheld. I can take these otherwise "wasted" hours and use them for personal time or more creative business time, rather than the drudgery of expense reporting that few salespeople want to do!

Ben Guasto
President
GTM Associates, Inc.

Preventing data collection errors can save big bucks
I have included a spreadsheet, shown in Figure A. We sent this to prospects and clients to help estimate how much money they save using the DataGet system (software and hardware that turns a Palm computer into an automatic gauge reading system at http://www.dataget.com).

FIGURE A


Oliver's spreadsheet shows how much you can save if you reduce data collection errors. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The line, "Estimated cost of incorrect data (per measurement)?" is grossly underestimated for most applications, but I use $1 since no one doubts it costs less than this. Unfortunately, most companies do not have a good handle on how much bad data costs them to fix or scrap the work later.

I met with a large auto company one time, which estimated each uncaught error was costing them $30,000 of profit a year. It is not unusual for clients to take over 100 readings an hour. As you might imagine, they like the system.

Oliver King-Smith
President
Tescina, Inc. (at http://www.tescina.com)

Saving time
I am a Dentist. I won a Palm m100 at a Dental Meeting. It took me a few days to figure out how I would use it.

I found the free program ePocrates to be very useful. It is a smart drug manual similar to a PDR (Physicians Desk Reference). There is a subroutine included in it called Multicheck that I use regularly. Often, new patients come to me who take ten or more medications concurrently. I need to know how all of these medications will interact with whatever medication I may prescribe or administer. Some medications have side effects. Sitting down with my PDR to check side effects and interactions of all of these medications would easily take a half-hour for so many medications. ePocrates' Multicheck allows me to do the same thing in about three minutes.

You can imagine what my office time is worth to my patients and me. This is a tremendous savings. Some of my friends and my father (a physician) have bought Palm OS devices just to utilize this program.

David Leader, DMD

Resolve problems earlier in the cycle
I've compiled some information for Pencel (a Palm software developer at http://www.pencel.com) to begin work on a case study. The subject of the case study is Capital Electric, a regional electrical contractor with around $50,000,000 in revenue. Pencel is helping them to develop a Palm OS handheld application for their service division which consists of about 15 crews. They are aiming to push this solution to other divisions in the company, such as Line Division, Datacon Division, etc., totaling around 150 crews.