The statistics were not in our favor. 45% of companies don’t survive five years. 95% percent of companies don’t survive 30 years. So we are delighted to be here to tell you that it is our 40th birthday and we could not be prouder. We thought of how to share this news. A cake of course, but how would we get it all to you? A song and dance perhaps on social media, but we’re not that musically inclined. We decided in the end to ask Gail Robinson who is known to many of you as the source of much of our marketing material to interview Chris Vandersluis. We wanted our President and the founder of HMS Software to look back and tell us about how HMS has continued to be so successful over such a long period of time.
Gail: Mr. Vandersluis, can you bring us back right to the beginning in 1984 and explain the motivation for starting HMS?
Chris: Sure. I actually co-founded the company with a partner at the time. He and I got it started. We were a two-man consulting company with a lot of enthusiasm and some experience in project management systems. Our first client was Philips Information Systems who actually designed and manufactured personal computers which were competitors to the IBM PC at the time. The proliferation of personal computers was just picking up momentum and we were at the right place and the right time to be advisors and consultants about software. Project Management software is everywhere these days but in 1984 that wasn’t the case. There were only a few vendors who made such software and we picked one of them for Philips. The deployment was complex but we were aided a great deal by the company having an established and experienced Project Management Office. We would come to find out that wasn’t as common as we would have hoped.
The implementation required a timesheet along with the scheduling tool we had picked and Philips agreed to let us write it for them. That was our first experience with creating a project-based timesheet system.
My partner and I would work together for some 10 years before he decided to move onto other things but in that time HMS had become recognized as a leader in Canada in high-end project management systems.
Gail: We call ourselves HMS Software but the full legal name of the company is Heuristic Management Systems. Inc. Where did that come from?
Chris: That didn’t actually happen until 1987. The company was continuing to expand and we were hiring our first employees. We decided to incorporate HMS but we were told by the Canadian government that our “HMS Software” was too close to the names of other possible companies and we would have to expand the acronym. The original “H” had been for the town my partner lived in so we decided that wasn’t going to work. We knew the “M” would be “Management” and the “S” would be “Systems” but we struggled for weeks with what the “H” should be. Finally in frustration, we sat down with a dictionary, committed to find a word in the “H” section we could live with. We got to “Heuristic” and thought how appropriate it was for people interested in project management analysis.
Gail: So HMS was primarily a consulting firm in its first 10 years?
Chris: Actually, we took on a product line from a company in Houston, Texas called Welcom Software. They had the scheduling tool Open Plan that we had deployed at Philips and we became their Canadian distributor. The combination of reselling Welcom Software’s products and our own consulting was our primary business during that time. Apart from Philips we were also called upon to write two or three additional timesheet systems during that time which would all come in handy in 1994.
Gail: When did HMS expand from its Canadian focus to its worldwide servicing now?
Chris: In 1993 My partner and I started talking about going our separate ways. It was an agreeable separation. I wanted to keep the project management focus and he had other ideas that better suited him so we crafted a deal where I could buy him out of the business. That culminated in 1994. My thinking had been to shift from being a distributor and consultant to becoming a software publisher. All our experience in project-based timesheets had given us some amazing background and experience in that domain and I decided that a timesheet would our first product. All the timesheet systems we’d written until then had been DOS based interfaces, so character only screens. We put together a new timesheet in that same mode and called it TimeControl version 1 but we were already hard at work creating a Windows version which would become TimeControl version 2. That took off at a pace that surprised us and we never looked back.
It’s HMS Software’s 40th anniversary but it’s also TimeControl’s 30th anniversary which we plan to celebrate later this year.
Gail: That’s a remarkable transformation. What happened with your dealings with Welcom Software?
Chris: We continued to distribute their Open Plan and Cobra products for a few more years but TimeControl took up more and more of our time and we finally decided to end our distribution agreement. Again, it was an amicable arrangement. Welcom would later be purchased by Deltek. Open Plan and Cobra are still products under the Deltek EPM product line and TimeControl has active links to those products even today, 30 years later.
Gail: Were your sales always done directly from the Montreal office?
Chris: There was a long time when products like TimeControl and other project management products needed local representation to be successful. We embarked on a campaign of recruiting TimeControl dealers some of whom we have maintained business relationships with even today. But the whole distributor, dealer paradigm started to shift in the early 2000s as Internet speeds increased. Where once we would have expected a dealer to get in their car and go sell TimeControl to a local prospective client, now that client was asking us to video conference that demonstration so they could see it from the publisher. It was quite a dramatic shift in the software business and it wasn’t unique to us. At that time, you’d have had to be a massive company to be able to buy software directly from Microsoft but these days, armed with a credit card, you can sign up for their software in minutes. Those changes weren’t even restricted to our industry. Finding a travel agent or insurance broker is much less common as people book their own travel or sign up for insurance online. So these days, yes, most of our sales are done in communication with our own staff in our Montreal and Toronto offices and the clients could be calling from anywhere.
Gail: Where has TimeControl been sold?
Chris: It’s all over the world. TimeControl is in use on every continent but Antarctica. In fact, there was a bid to provide timesheets for the US base in Antarctica many years ago and I would have loved to have closed that deal but the timing was all wrong and we weren’t able to participate. Having clients worldwide is both a privilege and a challenge. We have users in all or almost all time zones. We have users who speak many different languages and have many different devices. We’ve tried to ensure that TimeControl is highly flexible and highly responsive to different types of users. It supports multiple languages but the module for creating a new language definition file is included too. So, if there’s a language we didn’t support or we supported a dialect that the client doesn’t prefer, the client themselves can translate perhaps just the timesheet or as much of the interface as they wish. Localization also carries to things like currency symbols and the way a date is displayed.
Gail: It’s a pretty remarkable team here. How long have they been together?
Chris: The staff are all amazing at HMS. Of our current employees we have three people who have been in the company since the 1980s and have seen the entire evolution of TimeControl from version 1 through today’s 8.5. It’s not common anymore for people to say they’ve made a career at an IT company but it’s been true here and I find it humbling.
Gail: It’s a remarkable story so far. Is 40 years enough?
Chris: We’re showing no signs of slowing down. Last year was our biggest year ever. The year before was until then the biggest year ever. We’re both profitable and growing and for any software publisher, that’s as good as it gets. We’re working hard on the next version of TimeControl and all its iterations including TimeControl Project.
As for myself, I’m not going anywhere. I’ve been privileged to be part of something that has impacted so many organizations. Our clients have put things into space and have created incredible engineering marvels. They’ve made medicines to cure disease. What else could I do that would have that kind of impact? It’s been 40 years so far but I can see HMS growing for years to come.
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