Welcome

ELAG is a software company that specializes in custom, web-enabled, Enterprise Business Systems.

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The Minibar Software is back live

In June of 2020, ELAG and Club Minibar's system shut down as a direct result of Covid-19. Nationwide, few if any minibars were left in hotels. A plea from some properties early in the summer of 2021 made ELAG re-open the nationwide Minibar System. Contact Ennio Galiani, ennio@elaginc.com, (818) 972-2620 to reinstate service or to sign up.

Why ELAG?

ELAG develops core enterprise software at fixed contract prices. We accomplish this through rapid prototyping, reliance on trusted software toolkits, and by rigorously avoiding non-critical processing tasks that add exponentially to cost and complexity.

Bottom Line: No hardware upgrades, zero learning curve, live in 30 days or (generally) less.

The standard industry practice is to focus on exhaustive project analysis to uncover every potential requirement, even those most would consider superflous or even wanton. ELAG recognizes that this approach to is too costly and too slow for many businesses. It also jeopardizes the success of many projects.

ELAG proposes possible directions and prototypes in 1-2 weeks since our deliverables have the flexibility to adapt as needed. It is our experience that many customers cannot visualize what they want until they see a working model. ELAG provides a functioning application early on, morphing it at the client's direction until the right solution is reached. We never lose sight of the propositon that 80% of the project requirements are achieved by 20% of the work.

ELAG never attempts to replace a legacy system the client relies on and cannot consider replacing except at great expense and disruption. If a legacy system has proved audit-worthy for years, we draw data from these systems as much as possible and extend them with fast, flexible query capabilities along with state-of-the-art document management and distribution.

A case in point is Microsoft's Great Plains. A number of ELAG's clients have found it unwieldy for invoicing, statements, aging, collections and ad-hoc query. ELAG can install one or more of the aforementioned modules in a few weeks, using only great plains data - the ROI is verifiable in the short term.

ELAG’s contractual scope is based on a client's specific goals for a project, including its deadline and the amount of work to be performed, rather than a catch-all list of requirements, many of which are non-essential when examined. ELAG controls costs by providing only what’s needed for a successful project:

• A statement of intent, and a list of goals the software should achieve
  
• A document that defines the quantity of work to be performed in terms of deliverable processes and workload, rather than a complex technical spec meaningful only to developers.

ELAG applications are sold for an agreed-upon fixed contract price. Any digression from this agreement is driven by additional customer requests. ELAG delivers solutions 4-12 weeks after a scope is agreed upon, depending on project size.

All ELAG applications are delivered with both on-line and hardcopy documentation. It is our experience that users seldom need it, because the first screen takes 10 minutes to 1 day to get used to, and all subsequent screens have identical look, feel and usability. While training sessions are available, they are seldom necessary.

Rapid adaptation is a process ELAG clients readily understand.

Case in point: after Argo Partners began using their completed, end-to-end, turnkey ELAG Application in March 2004, they have been issued 95 new versions of the front end (latest is CMS 9.5) without any downtime, as a direct result of change requests, enhancements, and entirely new screens. Request response time ranged from 10 minutes to 1 week, depending on enhancement size. The back end has been enriched by 200 new rules and three new dynamic report views.

With the exception of stylistic formatting of printable output ALL ELAG Applications implement the client's business rules as Stored Procedures in the Database Server. Why is this important? because once an application runs on 500 or more desktops, and the employee(s) responsible for client change requests calls ELAG to make such a request, the change will be reflected everywhere instantly, from New York to Macao, without disturbing or interrupting the other 499 users in any way.

Whether with PC Anywhere, VPN or Citrix, ELAG maintains 24/7 links to its customers' ELAG Appplication Servers. This assures the best service level and most rapid issue response time in the industry.

Data retrieval speed is vitally important to most business systems, a fact often overlooked by our competitors, especially if their data retrieval and formatted output take a long time to run. Users may abandon an application if they perceive a function takes longer on a PC than manually or in Excel/Word. That is why data retrieval performance can become so crucial to an application's success.

Here are some ELAG system benchmarks for evaluation and comparison purposes. The following assumes a worst-case scenario, SQL Server 2000 with dual 1GHz Processors (2003) and 2GB of memory (25% of maximum RAM):

• 75,000 Credit Card Transactions retrieved from 7.5 million in under 20 seconds
• 14,000 American Banker subscribers from an 875,000-subscriber pool in under 8 seconds
• 11,000 bankruptcy claims from a pool of 250,000 in under 3 seconds (10 columns of data)
• 500 rows/10 columns of aggregated, business-specific calculations (week or month-end figures, deferred revenue, etc.) from pools of 1,000,000 rows of detail in under 15 seconds
• 2000-3000 WYSIWYG Invoices Previewed before printing in under 8 seconds
• A 16MB, formatted HTML document with 11,000 rows and 65 columns in under 90 seconds

These figures hold up in a multi-user environment (tested with 850 potential users, probably 200-250 concurrent) with 4-8 GB of RAM.

A Citrix Server running ELAG Applications will be close, with maybe a 10% deterioration in performance - for broadband clients.

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