Q: Bob, tell us about the company you work for, where you are located, and how you use Alpha Five.

I have worked for John Wilde & Co Ltd, based in Birmingham which is pretty well slap bang in the middle of England, for the last 23 years. The company which was established in the early 1960's by Mr. John Wilde is the largest manufacturer of coffin furniture in Europe (that is all the handles, name plate ornaments etc that go on coffins and caskets) The company employs approx 100 people on its two sites, one here in Birmingham and one in Glasgow.

Q: Can you tell us about your background and how you came to be involved with Alpha Five?

I come from an engineering background and joined the company as works manager in 1979. It soon became clear that if we were going to stay on top of our game we would need to install some sort of system for recording sales and stock so we could plan our production. Personal computers were still very expensive at this time but I did acquire a BBC Model B computer which was used extensively in schools in the UK. It was a neat machine with 32k of memory and you could fit a 5 ¼ external floppy disk drive or use a simple cassette recorder to store programmes and data. I loved that machine for one reason, when you switched it on it was ON, no waiting 2 minutes for drivers to load etc. This machine gave me my first taste of using database applications and I first of all automated our invoice production procedure. Having shown the owners of the business just what an improvement in productivity this simple task could bring they agreed to buy a small networked system.

This was a server based on a 286 processor with a 40 mb hard drive and the three workstations were 8088 processors with floppy drives only (I think the workstations cost ($2000 dollars back then). We also bought a proprietary integrated package for handling sales order processing, stock control, purchasing etc. We are still running (several versions later) the same package at the core of our business but it now sits on a 1ghz 40gb server with 30 nodes on our network. Whilst our off the shelf package was good there were certain tasks and reports etc that it couldn't provide but there was a tool for extracting data as a simple comma delimited text file. I went out and bought a copy of Dbase III which was THE database tool at the time and whilst I did achieve what I wanted it was a very steep learning curve and very time consuming.

In the late 1980's I was attending a trade show and got into conversation with a guy who was selling a simple software package that he had written in Alpha Three and he told me how easy it was to use. So off I went and bought our first copy of Alpha and as they say "the rest is history". Having gained in confidence thanks to the ease of Alpha I decided to try and write a package we could sell to our existing customer base of over 1000 funeral directors in the UK. When I compare our first rather crude efforts with our current offering I cringe with embarrassment but we did manage to sell a few and the word started to spread and very soon I was working pretty well full time on the project.

Q: Are there any issues you have with Alpha Five because you are developing for a British clientele?

Not really, the only one I can think of is the date issue, not the fact that, and no offence here, you guys write dates back to front, but the old school here still like to see dates printed as 21st April 2002 or 2nd March 1999, so we had to write a function that would insert the 'st' or 'nd' as required. I believe Ira (Ira Perlow) has written a far more elegant function than mine but then Ira has written just about every function going.

Q: So you came to Alpha Five via Alpha Three and Alpha Four. How did you find the transition to Alpha Five?

The transition was awful, like so many bad experiences my mind has blanked it out. No seriously it was a case of the "teaching an old dog new tricks" syndrome and much of the difficulty was due to the basic transition from a DOS based environment where the keyboard is king to a Windows environment where the mouse plays such a big part. You have to accept that when moving an application from Alpha Four to Alpha Five, you must treat it as a positive opportunity to review and refine your application whilst still maintaining the basic data structures.

Q: Now that you are on the other side, was it worth it?

Without question, now that we have climbed the hill, the view from the top is splendid.

Q: What do you see as some of the major differences between Alpha Four and Alpha Five?

Using drag and drop to design forms reports etc and being able to accurately size objects and also, the use of cut and paste to speed things up. Although one simple thing I do miss is a simple way to display flashing text.

Q: Why have you and your company chosen Alpha Five to develop in?

Like I said ease of use. You have to realize that the Funeral business is probably the most conservative business in the world. Some years ago we switched from supplying slotted woodscrews to fit the handles, to a crosshead (Phillips) type screw as some of our bigger customers wanted to start using air tools. The outcry could be heard all over the land, "Why should I buy another screwdriver, I'm still using the one my grandfather bought in 1897 and it's not worn out yet". We had to compromise and to this day we supply a combination headed screw. So when it comes to convincing a Funeral Director that he should computerize his business you have to be able to say "Show me how you work and produce your accounts and letters and we will reproduce that in the system". This in turn means that whilst the underlying data structure is the same for all our clients each one has to have customized letters and reports and only Alpha can let you do this very quickly.

Q: About how many clients are using your Alpha Five applications?

We have 110 customers using our software on 164 sites in total. Some sites may have as many as 10 stations on a network but the majority are stand alone systems.

Q: It sounds like you provide a high degree of customization for your clients. How do you go about supporting all these 'custom' installations?

We keep a copy of each clients system zipped up on our server which we can quickly download on to a workstation and view as problems and queries arise. We insist all user sites have PC Anywhere installed so we can either actually show them on screen where they are going wrong (of course we may even, although this is very rare, quietly download a bug fix if we have made an error).

Q: It would seem that upgrades to the application might be tricky with all the different customized installations. Have you found this to be the case?

Yes although the actual table structures, field rules etc are common to all systems, the variations will be with forms, reports, letters and labels. One common problem is a client will re-design their stationery without telling us and then expect us to reconfigure all the documents to suit. It would be great if parameters such as page size and margins could be a global variable. Another area of difficulty is the one of designing reports for specific printers so it can take advantage of features such as multi bins etc and the printer then breaks down and the client buys a totally different one and wonders why the documents don't print. This problem is even more acute where you are using a network printer and it is impossible to replicate its name and drivers on our system when designing the layouts. I understand version 5 is much more friendly in this area and is one of the features I will be investigating real soon.

Q: Can you give us an idea of the main features of your application and how it is used by your clients?

In arranging funerals there are a number of documents the Funeral Director will need to produce such as confirmation of arrangements to both the family and the clergy, estimate of costs, obituary notices for the press, orders for flowers etc. After the funeral they will need to produce an account, perhaps collect and collate donations to charity, maybe arrange a scattering of cremated remains or a memorial of some sort. Many of our clients started out by creating Word templates etc to do this but of course each document has to be produced separately. Whereas using our system a single data entry point will produce all the necessary paperwork. We make extensive use of lookups into tables containing local data such as names and addresses of Ministers, Churches, Crematoria etc and generally try and keep the amount of typing the user needs to do to produce the finished result to an absolute minimum. The other big selling point is the "history" aspect of the system. It is quite common for a family to approach a Funeral Director to arrange for Granny's funeral and say "You did Grandpa 10 years ago and we want exactly the same arrangements". With Funeral Manager its very simple to look up those past details.

Q: How many people are employed by your company to develop, maintain, and service your Alpha Five application?

Currently two and a half.

Q: Do all in this group develop with Alpha Five, or are some dedicated to client support?

Two of us are dedicated to development and support and we are actively seeking an additional pair of hands. The workload is highly variable, some days we might get one simple call and others will leave you feeling like you have been run over by a large truck. The really bad days are when you would prefer to be run over by a large truck!

Q: What are the differences, as you see them, between the American and British funeral industry, and how does that help or hinder your enterprise with Alpha Five?

There are a number of packages on offer in the USA and I have looked at several of them and they are broadly similar. The differences are in what data has to be recorded for statutory purposes and of course the fact that you simply do not speak "Proper English"

Q: What do you see for the future of your application? Will you be seeking to expand your market, and or add features now that Alpha Five version 5 has been released?

Yes indeed, we hope to generate some revenue by producing a saleable upgrade for our exiting customer base and given the new RTF export feature we are looking at a standard shrink-wrapped package that we could sell at a much lower price. I am even looking at some sort of "pay as you go" option so the package becomes more affordable for smaller businesses. The encryption feature in version 5 means you could supply a secure "control file" which would allow only a certain number of records (funerals) in the main table and the client could then buy an xxx unit top up.

Q: Version 5's ability to export reports and email in Rich Text Format (as well as several other formats) is a wonderful addition, but why will this feature allow you to create a 'shrink-wrapped package for your industry?

Experience has now taught us that whilst each Funeral Director thinks he (or she) has got it just right in the way they produce their documentation there are in fact a relatively small number of "themes" and we could incorporate those within a standard package. This way the user could then export the document that A5 produces directly into Word and "fine tune" it to their particular needs. Even with our highly customized systems there is always the exception to the rules the client lays down, perhaps they knew the family very well so would use less formal language in their correspondence. This feature would address those special cases.

Q: Are there any other new features in version 5 that you can see a place for in your application?

Email from within the package, an increasing number of the clergy here in the UK are getting "on line" and I know a number of our clients would like to be able to email them with the confirmation of arrangements. Another use of email would be the submission of obituary copy to newspapers. The zip based backup routines will be helpful. Data file encryption will be useful too, as mentioned above. With version 5, I feel like someone who has just opened the door on a treasure store and can see all the goodies glinting inside but I need the time to fully open the door and explore. The trouble is exploring doesn't generate revenue!

Q: Can you give us some idea of the size of the Alpha Five user group in Britain?

It's a rather loose liaison of people on email at present but I know Keith Hubert is anxious to get a more formal structure up and running. I think when he asked via the Alpha Software bulletin board for UK based people to make themselves known, about 40 people responded. One of the problems is that Alpha has never had very good representation here in the UK.

Q: What do you think could be done to increase Alpha Five usage in Britain?

It is the same problem that Selwyn, Richard and company face in the USA, and that is to get the message across to corporate suits that there is a better way than Microsoft Access and that it is safe to go down that route. I think there used to be a slogan that went along the lines that "nobody got fired for buying an HP printer" and the same mentality applies with Microsoft.

Q: Do you see any differences in the opportunities in Britain for Alpha Five developers as opposed to here in the United States?

No none, the possibilities for us all are limited only by our individual imagination.

Q: Bob, I'll bet money that we will see another Alpha Five conference coming up later this year or early next. What do you think, can you get a plane load of "Proper English Speaking" Alpha Five enthusiasts to make the trip?

If you stop putting tomato juice in good English Beer !!
Seriously I think a video CD with clips from the various sessions would be good to give people a taste of what is achieved. I think it was worth every penny and learnt as much in 3 days as I would in a year.


Bob Whitaker is an Alpha Five developer from deep in the heart of England. Bob has been using Alpha products since 1990 and has developed applications for the Funeral Industry, market research operations, and jewelry wholesaling. When not at a keyboard, Bob likes to travel, play tennis and sail boats. Bob can be reached at bob.whitaker@virgin.net.
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