Our 350 glass artists work on consignment, so recordkeeping is vital to our business. A number of years ago, we hired a developer to create a custom software program to help keep track of our artists' sales and inventory.
We did everything right -- daily backups, store copies off-site, etc. Then one day, our computer hard drive started making a terrible noise and froze. We assumed we could easily restore our data. Unfortunately, our software developer had never given us a copy of the actual custom program. That meant we had to reconstruct our entire hard drive.
First, we had to physically send the drive to a computer specialist in New Jersey who knew how to rebuild the basic program. Then we had to work with him for four weeks customizing the program. In the meantime, we had to track every single order, sale, customer profile and $600,000 worth of glass art manually.
That generated huge amounts of paperwork -- information we then had to verify and load onto our new system. In the end, we didn't lose any money, but it took my small staff of eight an entire summer to get up and running again.
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