The Support Group Blog

The West Side Montessori School (WSMS) has been offering a Montessori program for early learners since 1963. The school has grown from fifteen students to over one hundred and they also offer a teacher education program  (WSMS-TEP) for adult learners training to become Montessori teachers. Based on the Upper West Side of New York City, they also have locations in New Jersey and Beijing China. In 2015, they renovated part of the children’s gymnasium into an adult learning space for their WSMS-TEP students. Needless to say, growth and development are important to the founders, faculty and students, both young and young at heart. And so we knew a Workplace Innovation Platform, like FileMaker, would facilitate that growth.

If you've ever planned an event, you can appreciate the immense amount of organization, coordination and communication required to effectively manage all aspects of the logistics. Technology, when leveraged effectively, can be extremely helpful in the process. Oftentimes event planners don't understand when and/or how to implement technology to streamline and automate tasks and information.

The prestigious University of California at Berkeley (UCB) came to us to help them streamline their event planning and management systems. The University Development and Alumni Relations department is responsible for generating and maintaining support for the university through various outreach initiatives including events for the Chancellor and fundraisers. The benefits of these programs circulate back to resources for the students and help the university to maintain its position as a world-famous institution.

As you may know, The Support Group has been offering FileMaker consulting services for over 30 years. So when it came to finding the best software platform to run nearly every aspect of our business, where did we turn? To the FileMaker Platform, of course!

We needed a framework for tracking our sales leads and customers, managing our projects, invoicing our production plus layers and layers of reporting. Our Vice President of Technology, Vince Dolan, was given the herculean task of architecting and building the system we affectionately call, Harry.  The name was inspired by a dog from the animated television series, Stanley.

Behind the Gloss

Gloss Studio provides photo re-touching services to a number of well-known brands within the fashion and beauty industry. An eye for detail and quality are essential in this line of business, but running the business as smoothly as possible is also important. A lot goes into creating the attractive images we see in marketing materials, a lot of communication, that is. Once the photos are received from the photographers, there is a slew of messages between the producers and re-touchers at Gloss Studio as they turn raw images into digitally re-touched works of art. Documenting, tracking and reporting the work became cumbersome within FileMaker Pro and so they asked The Support Group to help organize and streamline some of their workflows.

The Kleening Business

RideKleen is a national mobile car wash and fleet management company. They leverage proprietary technology to conveniently offer eco-friendly cleaning processes to both their fleet and corporate customers. Their nimble team of managers and leaders are able to provide efficient, reliable and quality service to customers large and small while fulfilling an altruistic purpose of preserving the environment and serving the community.

Scientific Specialties

Scientific Specialties (SSI) manufactures plastic consumables for scientific research. But more than that, they adhere to a very high standard of product quality and excellence. They control the manufacturing process and environment in which their products are developed and strictly enforce ISO and Cleanroom classification requirements. Learn how FileMaker Pro helps their operators efficiently manage quality assurance tasks.

A FileMaker Pro customer success story: the Nebraska Forest Service.

The Nebraska Forest Service uses FileMaker Pro to reduce operational redundancies and centralize data in order to protect natural forest resources and educate the community.

We are so excited that FileMaker Go has reached a major milestone — more than 3 million product downloads!  What a tremendous accomplishment and a true testament to its efficacy.

We created a billing system with FileMaker Pro so that our client could focus on providing quality care.

Family Lives is the type of organization we rarely hear about, but they have a critical mission in life. Their team of medical professionals provides high quality, in-home health care for some very sick young people, who, in many cases, would otherwise require institutional care.

The Support Group Helps a National Entertainment Company Manage Royalty Reporting

What’s a well-known, national entertainment organization to do when they need a way to track the music for their many television programs? Turn to FileMaker Pro, of course.