The "whys" behind that message

Firstus, there's no "off the shelf" application that will mesh with your company's system. Even those written in the same software will be different (your company might, for instance, be using "last name", "first name", "middle initial" as the first three fields in their database. The shopping cart might be using "transaction number", "first name", "middle name" as THEIR first three fields. They'll be different sizes, have different parameters, and so forth. If you try to slap "transaction number" into the "last name" field, it might go... but you won't be able to find Mr. Eglan Wilson's record at all.

Why you have to sit down and find out how the software works: because there will be only a few people (probably women) in the company who do the data entry. They can tell you where the issues are with the current software... and they're the poor folks who will be dealing with the new software. Find out where their bottlenecks are in the process.

As an example, I did a software search for a department where the phone rang constantly and the secretary was being interrupted on the average of every three minutes. I looked at the kinds of documents she needed to do and the distraction factor. On the basis of this, I picked Microsoft Word as her word processor over Word Perfect (this was 20 years ago, and WP was a fairly complicated package.) She wasn't stupid, but her frustration level in trying to learn and memorize all the complex keystrokes and combinations for Word Perfect while being interrupted every three minutes meant that it would NOT be good for her to give her WP.

Find out where the trouble spots are. And interview *everyone* who deals with the software. The first person may be the only one who has trouble with one section.

The consequences of not having a well-integrated system: someone may have to end up doing double work, entering all those internet orders. This person's workload will have gone from an ordinary load to nearly doubling or tripling. Data will get lost, will get compromised, and the situation can cause poor customer service.

What about going to a new system entirely -- replace FileMaker with something else? Well, here you run into the following factors: throwing new software at busy people (adding to stress), trying to move the data to the new system without making everybody retype EVERYthing (if it's a lot of data, this often means hiring temps just to get going in a reasonable time), cleanup of existing data, and concerns about whether your package will be supportable in the future.

I realize that a small company can't often afford a full-time programmer, but having the position makes the company proof against a lot of other problems. For instance, I've seen a number of instances where the company that sold the software went out of business or got bought out by someone who then no longer supported the software. The former users were left hanging, often with DOS based software that runs poorly under a Windows implementation.

Having your own pet programmer means you can do other stuff (like, for instance, have them convert the video into multiple file formats and set up streaming video, leaving the rest of the staff free to do the creative stuff.) It also means that if he gets hit by a bus, the next programmer is going to have to work with what the company has or make it work. You get data recovery, integrity, and followthrough.