Based on a few successes at SICPA, and a thirst to try something with a little more traction, I joined Supply Chain Logic, Inc. in May of 1997. When I arrived, I came to the company as employee number seven and held the lofty title of Director of Information Systems. Then again, the company had exactly seven people at the time, so there were more people than information systems back then.

SCLogic was a value added reseller for Symbol Technologies, the leader in wireless data collection and barcode terminals. Symbol has recently partnered with Palm computing (then the hottest thing on the market) and they jointly constructed the SPT 1500, essentially a Palm III with a barcode scanner embedded into the casing.

Regardless of a few hiccups, the SPT 1500 brought a user-friendly barcoding terminal that was also easy to develop for. Numerous applications were conceived that would bring barcoding to the masses. However, SCLogic would focus on one industry that it was somewhat familiar with, that of logistics.

When I began at SCLogic, there was only one other software developer on staff. He had crazy talent, but his attention was focused on customized builds of old fashioned DOS-based terminals that were the core of the SCLogic business up until that point. Therefore, I was tasked with fielding the more modernized systems (thick client VB, palm and later web-based).

The SCLogic customers had numerous ideas of what systems they wanted, from inventory monitoring to computer asset tracking to medical record maintenance. However, what all of these systems had in common was, at the core, the need to track something and, more often than not, record an electronic picture of a signature. The SPT 1500, along with my recent experience with SICPA's Hawkeye system led to the development of a next generation tracking system for the masses: SCL Intra.

To make a long story only a little bit longer, SCL Intra immediately gained traction in the markteplace, thanks to numerous trips to conventions such as MailCom and ScanTech. There, the SCLogic crew, who were growing rapidly to deal with the demand, stood diligently in front of their DataVan and answered every question conceivable about their new and unusual product that incorporated never-before-seen easy to operate screens... all for a extremely competitive price.

What started out as a MS Access VB thick-client application with a Palm Hotsync connection became a mostly ASP-based, DLL driven enterprise application with a Aether Scoutsync server, all feeding to Oracle or MS SQL Server. Of course, MS Access was still supported for the entry level systems, but the larger systems held the most allure to our now forty or so employees. One of the highlights of SCL Intra, I would have to say is the printing of an article about one of our installations in the Wall Street Journal's Marketplace section (front page, actually). If you would like to read it, follow this link.

So everything was going so well... why did I leave? After all, I worked with lots of very smart people, who thought that they could take on the world (or at least the package tracking side of it). I was Vice President of Software and Technical Services and was not without some very solid management experience to build on. I was with friends and making some pretty good money doing some very cool things. So why leave?

Simply put, the bottom dropped out of the stock market, leaving us with little opportunity to receive funding that would value the company where its owner, Mike Saldi, would have wanted. It was not that SCLogic needed it-- we were private company and, for the most part, operating in the black (well, almost). However, there was no money to hire additional programmers, so I found myself coding the same screens over and over again, which had become very tiresome.

Personally, I was looking for the next greatest technology and, while I thought that I had found it in J2EE (versus plain-Jane VB), I knew that I would never get the opportunity to pursue my vision of the true enterprise-scalable application that I had in mind. So, I excercised my options and went on to bigger and better things. Well, maybe not better, but life is nothing if not full of surprises.

As a post-script, SCLogic is still alive and kicking and I still have many friends who are living the dream of SCL Intra. I wish them well and hope that they make me and themselves very wealthy some day! If you have enjoyed this article, be kind and visit their website. Their webmaster is a friend and would likely enjoy the extra hit on their counter.