e-destinACCESS: The Destination Services Technology Solution

The History of e-dmc Software
as told through an interview of

Wayne W. Beaubien: CEO & Chief Software Architect of e-destinACCESS


“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”. – Albert Einstein

When I first started being a dmc, I knew that I couldn’t live in this business with the tools of that time period that were acceptable in business during the 80’s. After all, I had worked at Xerox when the fax machine was introduced back in the mid-70’s and was fresh out of the U.S. Army! I tell you, the technology we had in the Army was way more advanced than in U.S. businesses. Any way, here we were in the mid 80’s and the best we could do to relay information was through a fax machine? Hey, we had two of them and they cost over $500 bucks each and they still have thermal paper on a roll (I don’t think there is a person in there 20’s that even knows what thermal paper is?)

Well back to my reality of the day. So another key tool of the day was a Telex machine! Anyone even know what that was? Hey, the only place I had ever seen one was when I was working on Wall Street and that was the weapon of choice for business in stocks and banking. So here I was with tools that did not make any sense because they really did not help my business, in fact they just created more paper and the necessity to file stuff!! Hey I not big on loading up file cabinets. So what was a guy to do?

One day in 1984 I read a factoid in USA Today that said if small businesses did not become involved with technology they would not be in business in 10 years. Now that struck me big time! So I contacted the University of Arizona to learn what was happening with technology and come to find out plenty was going on. However, most of it was in government and universities. In fact the first time I saw what the internet could do was at the U of A and boy was I blown away. Hey there was no web browsing or any of that stuff, but you could send a letter to someone across the globe is seconds and you could source information from other universities. In fact a couple of guys there figured out how to operate pit mines in Malaysia using the internet and 800 mhz radios. Now that is another story that has legs!

So from that initial visit and further research I decided to move ahead with finding a way to run a business that we all know is absolutely unmanageable for the human brain to comprehend. After all in the dmc business the one thing you could count on were mistakes! In fact if you only had one mistake a day per program I soon learned was a good thing! Now when has a mistake ever been a good thing?

So the road was cleared to begin to find out how to build a business around technology but there was no technological solution in a single source. Macs were just coming up with single user stations and IBM had floppy disk drives; all of which could not be connected (now known as networked). So between the folks at Microsoft, Netware and 3 COM there was a solution mapped out for us to follow. The server came from Ireland (hey it was a $30K purchase for a machine that had the capability of have 15 users on the same system, or Network); the hard drive came from a 3 COM source in a wooden crate costing a whopping $3,600 for a 300 mega bite capacity and boy, oh boy were we cooking with gas (another reference to the fact that years prior to gas people cooked with wood- remember Einstein?)

Anyway, now came the biggest problem: how do you write a software product? Well, along comes Price Waterhouse, my accounting firm. Well they had an idea! They heard the Federal Government had a grant program for companies interested in developing technology and we were interested!

So after days of writing out a dream of what we could do by developing technology that allowed us to purchase goods and services from small companies with little effort, the Department of Commerce granted us some money - and I say some - but was it enough to fully develop a software product? Absolutely not! So we pressed on by sitting around our conference room table for hours on end discussing where to start?

Eventually, we started with transportation because that was our Achilles Heal! Mistakes were the norm and we couldn’t handle that at all. After two months we had the first module ready and we could finally use that computer system that cost a fortune! Up to that point we used it to prepare our documents using WordPerfect (again for those of you that don’t remember WordPerfect was the weapon of choice for a multi-user platform because there was no mult-user platform, we all could use it at the same time. Another process we had down was Lotus Spreadsheets, oh yes again Microsoft’s Excel was second best just like MS Word) .

Hey that whole story of how those companies succumb to Microsoft is another story of worth. After all how do you go from dominating a market with the finest word processing tool to being virtually non-existent?