Broker: one word, centralise

If I had to say in one word why Broker exists, it would be this one: centralise.

I sell parts. Before you can sell one, you have to know where it is, in what condition, with which document, and have its photo at hand when a customer asks for it. That work — the stock, the photos, the documents, the location, the storage — was taking time I would rather have given to something else. That is why I decided to build software: to take that task off my hands.

Once that time was recovered, I put it into my administration, and I added one more layer: the quote and the shipment, in the same place as the stock. One customer, one shipment, one tracking number, and that's it. No more folder on the computer desktop, no more copy-and-paste from one file to the next, the part in a spreadsheet and its photo on a phone. It takes a little time to get used to the software, I won't pretend otherwise; but the flow is simple and direct, and it does not change.

There is another reason, which came with the first. My company is going through ISO 9001 certification. Writing procedures means knowing who does what, who describes what, how resources are managed — and being able to show it. So I wanted the software to play that role too: everything that comes in, goes out or changes is recorded there, in the same place, and that is what we build our procedures on with our partners around the world.

Broker is not a big system. It is the tool of a broker who wanted to make his own work simpler, and who shares it with those who do the same trade: each one adds what he is missing, and the software grows with him. We make things simpler, and we move forward.