2015 is the year on our about page marked "ERP, POS and hospital systems", and it earned the label. After years of building bespoke business applications, Eziline consolidated the common parts into products it could configure for new clients instead of starting over: an ERP for trading and manufacturing businesses, a point-of-sale system for retail, and a hospital management system for clinics and hospitals.
From projects to products
The move was pragmatic. Most business systems need the same core, accounts, inventory, sales, purchases, HR, reporting, and differ in the details. Building that core once, well, meant a client could have a working system in weeks and spend the budget on their specifics. It is the model behind the EZIERP, EZIPOS and hospital products that are still in the catalogue, and behind the "first release in 40 days" promise on our home page.
The technology of 2015
ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) landed in June and modernised JavaScript with classes, modules, arrow functions and promises; Babel let us use it before browsers caught up. React Native shipped in March and promised one codebase for both mobile stores, which we trialled on smaller apps while keeping native for the demanding ones. On the back end, Laravel 5 and PHP 7 (released in December) gave the products a faster, cleaner base.
Internships and the team
The summer internship programme ended with an Internship Completion Ceremony in September 2015, one of the earliest events still on this site. Training was becoming structured: a syllabus, mentors, a final project, and offers for the interns who shone. Several of today's senior developers joined that way.
- Products: ERP, POS and hospital management systems configured for their first clients.
- Mobile: React Native trials alongside native Android and iOS.
- People: a larger, more structured internship intake and a growing QA and support function.
Looking ahead
Products change a company's rhythm. Instead of a sequence of projects, 2016 would be about versions: a release plan for each product, a support policy, and the first proper documentation. That required the test and support teams to grow faster than the development team, which they did. On the technology side, three things were on the roadmap: HTTPS everywhere, because browsers were about to start flagging plain HTTP; progressive web app features for the dashboards used by staff in the field; and PHP 7 across all hosted systems for the speed. The company also began planning its own corporate housekeeping. With overseas clients and public-sector enquiries, a formal private limited company and a foreign entity were needed, and the paperwork for both started in 2016 and finished in 2017.
