Business Management Software
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Projects Manager | Address Manager | Locator Manager | Client and Calls Manager | Y2K compliance

The Third Rail ® has been building business software since 1981 for companies that want to "automate" their business processes. The focus has been those processes that are time consuming and difficult to gather all information needed to provide a quick and complete solution to a business problem. While in the early years, almost all of these programs were "custom designed" for a specific business, The Third Rail found that in many cases, the task were very similar between businesses thus allowing more of the custom designed programming to be incorporated into the software so that end users could customize the setup of these programs to meet their own business concepts. With these "Objects" and "Utilities" in place, what was originally designed for a single company can now be used by a wide group of end users. The buzzword for this concept is: "reusable objects". Yes, The Third Rail still does extensive custom design programming when required.

At this point it may be useful to explain the concepts that The Third Rail uses when designing software. These concepts are universal (in our opinion) for any good software, but are extremely useful for the business community. They are:

Samples of Business Software designed and build by The Third Rail (TTR):

NOTE: It' taken a while, but almost all of the programs have
been converted to 16 or 32 bit Windows Operating systems.
Windows 2000, NT, 98, 95, and 3.1.   A standard
Windows PC work station will meet all of the requirments
of these programs.   Since nearly all of these business
programs are "Group" programs, they require being run
on a LAN or WAN where multiple users are involved.



TTR's "Projects Manager" ©

Third Rail, Projects Manager, Resource Manager, Workflow Manager.

Converted to Windows (32-bit) in 1999 (upgrated 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), Projects Manager has been in continuse use for seven years of vender's Windows 2000 certification.   It was during the Beta testing that this program was found to greatly exceed the functionally anticipated from our previous DOS version that there is no comparison to it at all.   Initially designed for mid to small size companies, we found out very rapidly that this software can greatly assist any size company where departmental managerment of people, resources, and workflow is required.   See below for pricing.

What makes Projects Manager so different from a mariad of other Project Manager Programs is that is does not evolve around a single project with multiple tasks and so forth (such as a Pert or Gant system focusing on a single project) , but it focuses on each "Action Person" who may be working as many as ten to fifty different Projects at any given time. It does this by an effective "Prioritizing system" which places each (of many) projects or tasks into a automatic prioritizing queue.   The key to this program is that it records the "STATUS" of each Project or Task assigned to an individual in such a manor as to allow all pertinent information to be seen by the person working the project, the Department manager, the Certifier of the Project or Task, and even up the hierarchy of the company to the CEO if desired.   You might think of this program as a "Tracking System" of a multitude of issues that put all issues into a prioritized format for each Action Person as well as all others involved with management of such activities.   End users love this program as it help in their everyday tasking,   Managers will know what the status of a projects/tasks at the touch of a button.   Projects Manager is self regulating to the point that very little overhead (if any) is required to keep accurate updates being added throughout the workday. It's a collaborative program the acts much like a e-mail system in that any user can see what going on at any time without the need to track down the Action Person(s) and ask questions. This program will be sold in four different configurations so as to give a company low cost to get into it, and yet have tremendous scale ability for Projects Manager to be used in any and all departments of a company.   After showing Projects Manager to a senior manager of a mid-sized company, the comment was: "What a great program, but my company won't buy it because it doesn't cost enough!". We hope the cost of this program will not deter any company from seeing what it can do for organizing: individuals, departments, and the company as a whole.

System Requirements:

Current Pricing through 2004:



TTR's "Address Manager" ©


In small to medium sized businesses, it seem that no one these days can find out the name and individual who has last talked to them, or what it is that they wanted, or what you wanted to accomplish with this individual. If this sounds familiar, then your company can benefit greatly from Address Manager. Powerful Search, Group, and report printing allows this program to be used as a "single data base" location for many other programs. This program is designed to work with almost any other software products such as any word processor or spreadsheet with basic import capabilities. Address Manager can produce mailing labels and merge files for mass mailings at the touch of a few keystrokes. The program has eight levels of security for controlling access to editing areas. It allows multiple "Notes" to be attached to an address record. Even has an "Action Reminder" to let you know when some action is due. This program is now available for Windows 2000, NT, 98, 95, and 3.1 (single user license= $45) or (multi-user license=$150). Max users in a multi-user group is 20 individuals


TTR's "Locator Manager" ©

This program allows employees to let other employees, and managers/supervisors, know where they are, and what emergency number to use should they be away from the work station for an extended period of time. This is extremely useful when scheduling meetings or group functions. This does NOT replace a company's individual schedule program (should you have one) that may be in place, but since it tracks employee "time away from his/her work station", it provides information that allows managers and coworkers to inter act electronically with each other in a passive mode. The Windows version is now available in a 100-user License for $200. The Locator must be installed on a LAN system with users "home directors" so that security can be controlled by LAN login access.


TTR's "Client and Calls Manager" ©

This program tracks a companies "Clients" and "Calls for Service" when they support a product where service charges may apply. It establishes support folks and what action has been accomplished until such time as the "Call for Service" has been completed to the Client's satisfaction. This program allows users oven a LAN or WAN to access the Real Time database for service resolution. It tracks time required to accomplish a service call, and the time spent in providing the solution. Companies who must support a user base (Clients) with technical service will love this program. This program must be custom designed for user requirements and therefore is not an "off-the-shelf" product. Considerable development time may be required.


There are many other programs that The Third Rail has designed over the past 30 years that are unique for a specific business. Everything from Third Party Billing software to Route structures for deliveries (to many to list here). The best approach to follow is to ask yourself this question: "Do I have some time consuming process within my company that can be efficiently processed with software?" Our answer to this question can usually be made by a quick assessment of what it is that you need to do and compare this with existing programs and utilities to see if there is an "off-the-shelf" solution, or if custom programming is required. There is No Charge for asking about programs and/or suggestions needed to solve a particular business problem. If The Third Rail has a solution for you, the details will be documented and sent to you as a proposal where it can be accepted, rejected, or modified before any charges are applied. In other words, "there is no cost to you to find out".

Several requesters have ask for a demonstration copy in the past for which we may not have. We would rather send you a full licensed copy and have you return it for a full refund if it does not meet your needs. By doing this, you the user get to see the full program (warts and all) to see if the program meets your needs. For us, we don't have to build separate demonstration versions of each of our products. We like users to use, and to be critical, of our products so that they will improve over time. For this reason we have a very liberal return policy as we know that sometimes a program is not quite what a requester wanted. Generally, we feel 30 days is sufficient time to acknowledge if the program is suitable.


TTR's Year 2000 Statement

All windows programs built by The Third Rail do contain stored dates which are displayed. All stored dates are converted into a Gregorian value that will properly indicate the full dd-mm-yyyy format. Having stated that date years are stored into a full 4-character year format, we do not believe that users want to type the full four-character year each time a date year entry is made. For this reason we have a user defined (in some programs) century window which will make an assumption about a two-digit year entry if not explicitly entered as a 4-character year. In either case, the user can alway enter a correct century... by assumption, or actual entry.

We additionally believe that, should one of our Windows programs be purchased, it should not be the responsibility of the user to have to purchase an update to be in compliance with Y2K issues. For this reason, a free update will be available for those who need/request it if their current version does not meet our design compliance with respect to dates and date arithmatic. This does not apply to the user's hardware should it be incapable of managing dates beyond 12-31-1999.


Contact The Third Rail for further information on sales at:
(805) 688-7370 - or E-mail: sales@thirdrail.com



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