by Felix Grant

When it comes to quality, small companies are often at a disadvantage. They want to get a better grip on their quality assurance issues, and they want software help in doing it, but they can't justify a thousand dollars here and two thousand there as an initial upfront investment. What to do?

If your business falls into this category, first take a long, hard look at exactly what your priority needs are. Those thousands of dollars spent on top-name products will certainly get you top quality, maximum power, first-rate support, luxurious interfaces and the latest and most subtle algorithms; but will it actually get you what you need to have and know how to use best? When you buy a vehicle for your business, you don't usually go for a Formula One racing car. For the same very good reasons, chances are you probably don't need software capable of running the economy of a small country.

Before rushing off to buy anything, ask yourself two pertinent questions, and answer them honestly:

• How much expertise do you have in the field you're trying to enhance with this software?

• How much time and effort are you prepared to invest to reduce your investment in dollars?

Software is like any power tool: It dramatically increases your reach, but it doesn't necessarily give you the skill to use that reach wisely. If your new software is going to be a benefit to your business, you must either already have the knowledge to use it well or be prepared to acquire that knowledge. That needn't be as intimidating as it sounds; contributors regularly offer tutorials in the pages of Quality Digest, excellent books are available and your local community college offers courses that will give you a quick start on the road to productivity.

You'll need to decide what area of work you want to concentrate on first; better to pick off one priority at a time, and do it well, than to try doing everything at once. My own area of expertise is statistical analysis, and because it's the subject that most of my clients want to know more about, I'll start there. The area in which they need the most help as they learn new software methods is general organization of their quality assurance efforts, so I'll finish up with that.

Basic spreadsheets
You probably already have Microsoft Office with Excel. If you do, following is a look at how to make the best use of it. If not, don't rush off to get it without thinking first. Excel is a very good spreadsheet program, but every product has its strengths and weaknesses--and Excel's strengths aren't in statistics. There are other options, with price tags starting under $50, including Microsoft's own Works package, but you'll get a spreadsheet considerably less powerful or adaptable than Excel. Real Microsoft Office equivalents include Corel's WordPerfect Suite as a commercial example and OpenOffice, which is a free alternative. Corel's spreadsheet, Quattro Pro, is in many ways better suited to quality assurance work than Excel and is accompanied by a more sophisticated word processor, although its database lags behind Microsoft's equivalent. Corel's suite also comes with a lower price tag: Currently, the standard edition is available on the Corel Web site for as low as $165. OpenOffice offers a spreadsheet at least the equal of Excel and, as a product of the open source software movement, is free to anyone who wants to download it.

Both Quattro and OpenOffice's Sheet application will open Excel spreadsheets, and Quattro will even pretend to be Excel if you really want it to. What neither will do is run the many add-in products specifically designed for Excel's architecture. If you already have Excel (it may have come bundled with your computer), some of these add-ins cost less than $250 and are well worth looking at--especially as they allow you to work within an environment (i.e., Excel) that you already know.

One top-of-the-range example is the Numerical Algorithms Group's Statistical Add-Ins for Excel which, for a mere $149, will bypass Excel's rudimentary statistical routines and replace them with the best industrial-strength alternatives available. I won't spend a lot of time describing it because I reviewed it in Quality Digest's "Quality Software" section in the April 1999 issue, but unless you're too experienced to be reading this article in the first place, you'll find in it every statistical quality assurance tool you could possibly hope for. I've used it to great effect on problems ranging from a small, hand-thrown pottery business to a large, experimental nuclear reactor.

Easy-to-use statistics packages
The NAG tools provide a good illustration of my earlier comment about the need for knowledge. What you get out of them will grow as you ramp up your experience and understanding of the methods that they implement. There are reasonably priced products that can ease your handling of statistical information and provide support for your developing confidence as well. They don't aim to compete with the likes of NAG, but they'll extend what you can do. Analyse-It, at $189, is one such application; WinSTAT, at $100, is another. In either case you get much less power than the NAG add-ins but are offered more reassuring help.

In an ideal world, though, a general spreadsheet isn't the best place for doing statistics. It handles data in ways that are at odds with good statistical practice. A dedicated analytical package will provide its own spreadsheet, usually called a "worksheet," that resembles Excel but is designed with statistics in mind. In most cases, you can still keep your information in Excel--almost all statistical worksheets will happily and transparently load your data from there. A good example is Kaleidagraph, from Synergy. My first experience with Kaleidagraph was using it to cut costs, increase successful recovery rates, reduce customer stress and shorten throughput times for a group of small family veterinary practices. I've since seen it used as part of a successful fight by a small-town grocery store against predatory pricing from a global supermarket chain. Kaleidagraph and other products like it don't pretend to do everything, but they do try hard to provide what you need while going as far as possible in easing the pain of learning new statistics.

Freeware
As with Open Office in the general--purpose department, free tools offer another option for getting software help with your statistical quality work. They have many advantages, two of which will be immediately obvious to you. First, you won't be locking yourself into the first software you buy; you can afford to play the field, trying this and that, finding out what you like and what you don't. Many commercial programs allow you a free trial copy for a month or so. Once you know what suits you, you can either go for a free offering or look for a commercial equivalent with the same philosophy and specification. The second advantage is an extension of the first: If you like some parts of this package, and other parts of that one, you can afford to use both. You might even end up picking and mixing from a whole range.

But you're probably thinking, "If it's free, is it any good?" The answer is a resounding yes. The quality varies but, like commercial software, the poor stuff tends to disappear while the best thrives. Look around at the big-name statistical software brands. Most started out as a noncommercial development of tools for internal use by professional users--usually in a university, though sometimes in a large company. At first, the results were distributed freely amongst colleagues who refined them and passed them on. After a while, the home institution realized it could retrieve some development costs and started charging for supply.

In some cases, free and commercial development continue side by side--the S language originally developed by Bell, for instance, is available as an expensive commercial product (S-Plus, from Insightful) and as an equally powerful free one (called R) maintained by expert users. The difference is that one comes with a luxurious interface and support, and the other doesn't. In other cases, a package will be free up to a certain point but commercial beyond it. KYplot is an example, with Version 2.0 still freely available, although you must pay for Version 4.0. Another motive for making software freely available is to get customer feedback: The product was developed for internal use somewhere, but by making it available to you, the authors get your ideas and criticisms.

Free statistical software is evolving and proliferating all the time. It's worth looking out for commercial vendors that offer free utilities either as bait or as a service--Dataxiom Software Inc., for example, sells a number of commercial packages at a price somewhat greater than $250 but also offers a very useful, free statistical calculator called DST Express.

Document organizers
But enough of statistics. I mentioned organization as well, and it's an important aspect of moving up from manual quality methods to software-driven ones. However well-informed you are to start with, on this journey you're going to learn a great deal and acquire a lot of information in a very short time--and will need to keep track of it all. Some of it will be in PDF documents or Windows help files. Other parts will be in spreadsheets, word processor documents or databases, or gleaned from books and Web sites. More will pour out of whatever statistics software you decide to adopt. Perhaps the most important bits will occur to you as flashes of insight in the middle of a phone call or other task--to disappear again unless you record them immediately.

There are many ways to organize and maintain diverse information across a variety of formats. You could go for a full-blown database application--but would you actually use it? I don't know about you, but I'm a slob in such matters and find that the best tool is one that's easiest to use. Once again, a range of alternatives is available, and many can be used on a trial basis before you buy. Which one you go for depends largely on your temperament and working methods. Three good examples that I've seen prove themselves over and over again under fire are (in order of ascending price) Time Saver Wolf, Onfolio and AskSam.

Time Saver Wolf presents itself as a document organizer but can be a note taker as well. Oriented around a familiar tree structure of folders, it's probably the most straightforward free-form document organizer I know.

AskSam is far more powerful. It offers a full-blown text base but also requires more self-discipline. If you're the well-organized type of learner who might later market your accumulated wisdom, then this is undoubtedly the way to go. The "pro" version of AskSam costs more than $250, but for most small-business users, the standard version will do just fine.

Onfolio shares parts of both philosophies, spanning the gap between Time Saver Wolf and AskSam with three different weights--from personal through professional to academic and scientific--and offers upgraded options between them. Onfolio can maintain its own text base (this is how it handles copied snippets by default), but it can also organize and interrogate external files. It can copy whole files or Web pages into itself on the fly, or link to them (think of your browser favorites or bookmarks bar, but on steroids). You can also type directly into it as an instant notebook, and it can manage your entire use of the computer if you want it to.

I've only touched on two of the many areas across which you might consider spreading your valuable investment dollars. Whatever direction you're considering, though, I hope I've persuaded you that there's much you can do on a limited budget.

About the author
Felix Grant is a lecturer and research consultant in the United Kingdom. He advises small-business users on quality assurance and software issues.