Do your software vendors eat their own dog food?

There’s an old saying, usually attributed to Microsoft in the 1980s: “Eat Your Own Dog Food.” The idea is that a company should use its own products and services for their day-to-day operations. This shows confidence in the product and also allows the company to experience its offerings from the point of view of its customers.?

Now, I have an 8-month-old 60-pound boxer/pit bull puppy – although if you told me he’s half moose, I would believe you. He has no problem eating his dog food, and the cat’s food, and my flip flops, and paper towel rolls, and the couch. Anything he can reach – and he’s a good five feet tall already on his hind legs – is dog food to him.

In our appetite for “our own dog food,”AML Partners has become a bit like my insatiable puppy.?

Eating our own dog food has been a great experience, and not only because it has increased productivity and saved us the cost of paying for a dozen different systems. ...We’ve made tons of usability tweaks and quality of life enhancements that continue to make the product better.

It started seven years ago with our original flagship application, SuretyTM. Designed primarily as a tool for financial institutions to on-board, risk rate, screen, and maintain their customers, thanks to its configurability we discovered it also functioned perfectly well as a Customer Relationship Management database. The same workflow engine that allows a bank to collect an individual’s contact information and their related parties could also be used to track our own customers, their key stakeholders, and any relevant information a relationship manager or support technician would need on the fly. Thanks to Surety’s dashboards, reports, and email alerts, management had metrics, controls, and oversight over the entire customer relationship process. We had our first taste of our dogfood and found it quite delicious.

But it wasn’t enough. We released RegTechONE (RTO) in 2019 and entered a new era of open-ended configurability. Rather than starting from a Customer Due Diligence/Know-Your-Customer workflow base and building out from there, RegTechONE gives you a blank canvas to paint whatever business process masterpiece you’d like. We rebuilt our CRM module from the ground up in an afternoon, with more functionality and interfaces to other systems than ever. We added a Project Management workflow, complete with assignable tasks, status tracking, user-specific queues, and key performance indicators – and connected it back to the CRM workflow. Now all of that information is in the same place, easily accessible when somebody needs to know the entire relationship history of a customer.?

That’s when we started wondering what else we could gnaw on. Support tickets were an obvious next step, since we were already going into CRM to make note of any issues a customer had. Instead of having a separate ticketing application, we just created a support workflow inside of RTO. Then we thought, we’re onboarding customers, why not onboard employees here as well? My wife was in Human Resources at the time and came in to consult on what information we’d need and what reports would be most useful. Again, in the space of a few hours, we put together a fully functioning employee workflow that included PTO tracking and the ability to request and approve time off.?

Seeing how much Operations was enjoying the kibble, Development started to get hungry. Because RegTechONE has a robust REST API, it was simple for them to add a step to our internal build process where a call is made to RTO to record when a new build has started and alert us whether or not it completes successfully. It also includes the notes the developers add with each code change, so we then configured the Build Management workflow to automatically compile those notes into Patch Notes that we can circulate internally or send to customers with each update.

Eating our own dog food has been a great experience, and not only because it has increased productivity and saved us the cost of paying for a dozen different systems. Now that our entire team is actively working in the application every day, we’ve made tons of usability tweaks and quality of life enhancements that continue to make the product better. For example, those of us with sensitive eyes are particularly happy there’s a dark mode now. Our integration with SiSense for data analytics and visualization is another.

We’re already seeing customers getting that first bite – buying the product just for Case Management, maybe – and coming back to us wanting to chew on something else, perhaps Vendor Management, or Sanctions Screening. Once a user understands the wide range of applications and the interconnectedness of everything within RegTechONE, it just makes sense to continue building it out into a one-stop shop for all your data collection and business-process needs. The good news is that we’ve made it incredibly easy to do so; you don’t even need a can opener.?

If you're interested in seeing what RegTechONE can do for you, please get in touch. We are experts at providing software solutions, and we are booking Proof of Concept demos for interested institutions and businesses.