All business owners understand that meeting customer needs is an essential ingredient in product development. If you respond quickly to customer needs, your company will achieve success. Respond too slowly and customers will likely look elsewhere for a better solution.

At DHS Worldwide, we are keenly aware that our explosive growth and corresponding success has been fueled in large part by our responsiveness to our customers. We have found that our satisfied customers are not hesitant to speak well of our company and of our products. By reacting quickly to customer requests, not only do we improve our customer satisfaction level, we also improve our product in a very positive way. In short, our product improves significantly when we listen to our customers and quickly incorporate enhancements into the software based on the important input we receive from our users.

Innovation In Technology
DHS Worldwide began its existence as a custom software firm. Our custom software clients include some of the largest corporations and governmental agencies in the world. This custom software development experience makes DHS Worldwide unique in the commercial records software development industry. DHS Worldwide has completed hundreds of custom software projects, including a wide range of bar code oriented projects not directly related to the records management industry. These custom software development projects provide a fertile source for collecting great ideas from a variety of industries, such as asset management and warehouse distribution management. Broad concepts such as inventory control, billing, and user training are not unique to a single industry and the knowledge gained from our custom software experience is routinely applied to our records management software solutions.

Due to the nature of custom software design, attentiveness to customer demands became an essential element of the corporate culture of DHS Worldwide. Careful questioning, flexibility and adaptability became deeply embedded in the organization. This heritage makes DHS well prepared to not only react quickly to our customers' needs, but also anticipate them.

DHS Worldwide has continually been a leader in records and information management software innovation. In 1996, DHS Worldwide released its first 32-bit Windows® version of Total Recall™, five years before any of its major competitors. DHS was the first to release a client based Web Server in 1998 that directly interfaces with our Total Recall™ records center software. In 1999, DHS released its first version of Scan-On-Demand™, a fully integrated, digital imaging document software. Recently, DHS Worldwide expanded its document digital imaging interfaces to include a high speed scanning module that operates utilizing bar code lead sheets. All of these programs are Total Recall™ modules developed by our own programming staff. They are not third party products that require support from third party vendors.

DHS also believes that interoperability between client-based information management systems and the offsite commercial vendor software systems represents an important trend in the future. Increasingly, organizations are looking for a fully integrated solution that manages information both in-house and offsite. To meet this demand, DHS Worldwide offers a full set of corporate records and information management products designed to directly interface with our commercial records and information management software. This link between the commercial information management software and the client information management software strongly solidifies the relationship between the parties. Our corporate packages allow the customer to manage all types of records including hard copy documents, scanned images and digital files such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Any commercial records center that utilizes Total Recall™ automatically qualifies as a reseller of our corporate information management software systems. As a result, our commercial clients can become full service records and information management solution providers.

Flexibility Is Key
We believe that software should be molded to match a record center's operations. We do not believe a record center should be required to mold its operations to match a software solution. Having worked closely with over 250 records centers, our staff is very knowledgeable about the industry. The DHS staff members are a great resource for ideas, but ultimately each record center must decide upon its own standard operating procedures. We have found that record centers can operate very differently and achieve a high level of success. In short, commercial record centers that cater to the demands of their clients can be assured of a higher level of success. Consequently, we tailor our software to match the ever-changing needs of our clients. This allows our clients to specialize in whatever areas of records management best match their opportunities.

This philosophy also drives our desire to offer more than one type of solution to our customers. We do not believe "one size fits all." In order to ensure that we have the proper solution for all commercial records centers, we offer two commercial records center products, our standard edition and our MS SQL edition. We understand that not all commercial record centers may wish to expend the effort and expense of installing and managing SQL servers. At any time, a customer can migrate from our standard edition to our SQL edition and receive full credit for any license fees paid for the standard edition, as a credit towards the purchase of the SQL version.

Fair, Honest and Consistent Dealings with Our Customers
DHS believes that our customers are our most important assets. We believe that customer satisfaction is directly related to all aspects of our business practices. For this reason DHS is focused totally on a fair and honest business model. Our pricing policies are an example of this philosophy. DHS provides a standard price list to each potential customer. Our pricing is clear, straightforward, well documented and freely distributed. We document, in writing, all our prices and provide our complete price list to any interested prospect. DHS also grants each customer a perpetual license to use our software. We never utilize any device or programming scheme that automatically shuts down the software each year. We believe that if you pay for the software you should have the right to use it forever without paying any additional fees.

Another factor that has fueled our growth is our dedication to providing the best possible technical support. We believe that DHS has the highest ratio of technical support and programming staff members per user in the industry. DHS is a very profitable, diverse company that has been awarded the highest possible rating of 'Strong' by Dunn and Bradstreet. DHS has no ownership relation in any commercial records center. Consequently, there is no possibility that we will find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being a competitor to any of our clients

In conclusion, we believe that our business philosophy, honest dealing, superior products and commitment to client support have been the catalyst that has propelled our success in the records and information management software industry.

About the Author - Steven J. Hyman is President of DHS Worldwide. Mr. Hyman has a degree in both computer science and business administration from Vanderbilt University. He also received a JD from the University of Miami School of Law. He is licensed to practice law in the state of Florida and Federal court. When he graduated from law school in 1981 he served as a prosecutor for a term of three years. From 1984 through 1991 he was in private practice. During this time he specialized in corporate law, real estate law, financial institution law and collections law. His clients included many governmental agencies, financial institutions and well-known wealthy individuals. In 1991, Mr. Hyman began to specialize in software development. He has managed thousands of software projects, both large and small, including many for fortune 1000 companies and governmental agencies. In addition, he is an active programmer, who has written millions of lines of software program code. Since 1994, Mr. Hyman has focused on the development and implementation of records and information management software. He has personally visited over 100 commercial records centers worldwide and has actively participated in a phases of records management and records management software implementation.