Mark's Musings

My wife hates arriving at the airport with 90 seconds left to walk on the plane. For me, what's the point of waiting for a plane? I've got better things to do.

My name is Mark Rockwell, and I'm an efficiency expert. Sometimes I say it proudly, sometimes with shame. That's because it's both a blessing and a curse.

Written By Mark Rockwell,
President of Rockton Software

The blessing? Take me into any warehouse where repetitive tasks abound, and I'll immediately find some way to improve it. Give me a little license, and I'll save gobs of money streamlining the process, eliminating steps, reducing errors, and boosting productivity.

The curse? I have little tolerance for wasting materials. I'm a handy person, and enjoy home remodeling. Nothing gets my ire quite like having to pay for ten percent extra flooring because the "professional" measurer doesn't know how to measure, or some "professional" installer is going to be so wasteful when they cut. When I install my own floors, I plan every cut in advance, so I know with precision just how much waste I will have, and it rarely exceeds two percent.

I don’t know how other people come to enjoy efficiency. My gift awoke to me when I played the role of Frank Gilbreth in my junior high’s production of Cheaper by the Dozen. Gilbreth was a master of motion study, and his biography paints a man with a passion to eliminate wasteful steps in almost every facet in life. The man shaved with two razors, and required foreign language records to be played when his kids bathed – so they’d learn something and not waste the time, and also finish bathing before the record timed out.

Having never touched bricks before, Gilbreth was once struck watching a seasoned bricklayer build a wall. In a bold gesture of confidence, he invited the mason in a race because he saw so many wasted motions. In minutes Gilbreth showed up the craftsmen, unfortunately ticking him off in the process. He later took his talents for masonry to commercial job sites and revolutionized the construction industry.

Gilbreth watched his family doctor perform a tonsillectomy, revised the process, and then ordered most of his children into assembly-line surgery, performing the most tonsillectomies imaginable in a short time. After all, if one kid needs his tonsils out, why not do them all? His kids were not amused.

His daughter Lill wanted to save for a pair of roller skates. At 47 cents, she won the bid to paint the fence around the yard. It took her ten days, and her dad would not let her quit on her commitment to finish the job (integrity was important.) While shrewd with business arrangements, Gilbreth also had a heart. The next morning Lill woke to find a new pair of roller skates under her pillow, a gift from a gracious father who knew the right balance in teaching life’s important lessons.

I really like this guy.

I remember my first gig as a computer programmer, where I impressed my boss by cutting the processing time of an address-parsing algorithm by 75%. Once I started working with computers, I began to see where they could take us, and the wonders of cutting out wasted time.

This is why SmartFill is one of my proudest achievements with Rockton Software. It’s kind of simple, really – type in what you know in order to find what you don’t know. I marveled at how it took a typical data entry person 12 mouse clicks to find a customer or vendor inside of Microsoft Dynamics GP, and I simply asked “couldn’t this be better?” The answer, I found, was yes. Way better. I managed to find a way to eliminate all 12 mouse clicks when doing a lookup. The result is tens of thousands of very happy customers who loyally use SmartFill – and get vicious if you ever suggest taking it away. If you haven’t seen the masterpiece of efficiency that SmartFill brings to Microsoft Dynamics GP, you should probably ask for a quick demo on it. I promise, the time won’t be wasted.

The rest of Rockton’s products, including our popular Dynamics GP Toolbox, are all about efficiency. 

Saving time, saving money. Making work simpler and easier.

As you might guess, I really like my job.

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