The Lost Prince

Explosive Expansion

That was the first night that Hellen began real work, as the 5 companies had 35 locations between them. The cash infusion giving them the budget they needed to hire the first staff despite not entirely needing them yet. They both knew training was going to take forever, especially for the coders as they would have to learn what they were looking at before they would be able to maintain or improve upon it.

By the time the first semester ended in December, they had signed two dozen more companies, their data improving the service as the staff adjusted to the work and actually began helping him.

When he walked into his office labeled Lead Programmer and Lead Coder, his older colleagues looked at him confused as he spent his first morning of winter break reviewing the work they had been doing to finish the final features of the system that would finally make it a complete restaurant management suite. It now had the ability to handle everything from staff scheduling, payroll, inventory, ordering, license compliance, absolutely everything a restaurant needed to operate absolutely everything.

"Are you lost young man?" one of the coders asked as he walked into Eric's office.

"No, I am not actually. You would be?" Eric asked looking up from his custom setup in the office.

"Peter Black, Lead Coder." he said offering to shake Eric's hand.

"Eric Knight, Head Programmer and Head Coder." he replied. "So this is your work?" he asked projecting the code onto the monitor facing him.

Peter looked it over real quick before answering. "Yes, it was a team effort but a lot of it is my work."

"Excellent, believe me, I have no issue with you perfecting my code." he said as Peter's eyes widened in surprise.

"You wrote this?" he asked amazed.

"Most of it, yes."

"Wow, I expected you to be older somehow." Peter said still amazed. "Your sure you don't have a problem with me fixing your coding?"

Eric actually laughed as he looked at Patrick. "I just barely finished my first semester at MIT, and I had already planned a few revisions in some of the coding based on what I learned this semester. If you can go over it and fix those problems and the ones I don't know about yet, I have absolutely no issue with that. Make sure you document the changes as appropriate so we know where they are if something breaks. Otherwise excellent work."

Peter actually sighed as he sat down. "So you really are my boss?" he asked.

Eric kind of shrugged. "Technically I suppose the answer is yes, however for at least the next few years I won't be in the office much. My focus is on school and my other job, me coming here is because I was bored and wanted to begin working on the changes I planned. Some of them I am finding you have already corrected. So Hellen will be your boss, so if she made you lead, you will be the one leading the team. Think of me as an intern that you work with sometimes."

Peter nodded as Hellen walked in. "Good, you two have met. We need to discuss how close to full launch we are." she said shutting the door.

"Give my team two weeks and we can have it finished." Peter answered. "Sorry, I suppose your team." he said looking at Eric.

"No, your team. Consider me a different department than you. You are in maintenance and support while I am in development." Eric told him. "I have to agree with his assessment, with my help we might make it in 10 days, but if you want testing and stability two weeks."

"Good, but I think we are going to have to find installers in other regions. We have a 200 location chain that just signed a contract and wants the complete program as soon as possible." she said.

Eric nodded as he looked at her. "Don't be afraid to hire an assistant if you need one. 200 locations is what, just over a million in fees?" he asked as she smiled and nodded.

"1.2 million for that contract actually." she said with a smile. "You should know that word is spreading rapidly, as I have another 2,000 locations worth of feelers right now." she said as both of them whistled as that was easily $10 million in additional revenue.

Eric whistled as he knew that would be a dramatic increase, especially if the rate of expansion kept up. "We will likely need to hire more staff to scale to that size. We don't have many errors at the moment, but that luck isn't likely to hold out with that many locations." he said as Hellen nodded.

"That is why it is good you two have met, while you are busy with school and other projects, Peter will be our Lean Coder and Programmer in control of the employees." Hellen said as Eric nodded.

"I told him as much, to consider me leading development while he lead support and refinement." Eric said as Peter nodded.

"Just let me know who actually reports to me and we will expand the team." he said formally. "How much of that budget will actually go towards operations?"

Eric shrugged. "For now my entire share of the profits can be reinvested into the company. Whether it be operations, maintenance or development."

Hellen nodded as she and Dimitry had also decided they wouldn't be taking any money out of the company for the first year. "As are we, for at least the first year. Let's get the rest of the features of this beast built so we can launch the entire thing. I think once we do we will have 10 times that many customers wanting to get our systems." she said before they set to work on their different tasks.

During the last week of his winter break, Eric and Peter finished building and deploying the financial aspect of the program, making payroll, sales and everything else run through the system to make it so that one more aspect of restaurant operations was part of their offerings.

"I have to say, I thought 2 months was going to be unrealistic for both features as I was sure finance alone was going to take that. You have a real knack for this kind of work," Peter said as their small team celebrated the achievement before they began working on the last system needed. "Not as elegant as it could be sometimes, but that is why you have us polish it." he said as Eric laughed.

"Nice way of saying what comes from development is a turd that you have to make look better." Eric said making everyone laugh as Peter looked at him shocked. "Relax Peter, I know that isn't what you meant. You all know, I haven't completed all the training you have. The fact some of it works at all when I finish it amazes me, so you perfecting it will only make us better." he said as they all cheered as Peter laughed shaking his head.

The launch of the final product sent shockwaves through the restaurant industry, as they were used to multiple systems being needed in order to make it work. His teachers even made them watch the press conference hosted by his company, Peter and Hellen doing an excellent job as the public face of his company. Once they finished however they learned what their second semester project was going to be.

"This launch shows us the importance of not forgetting that even what was made and works now, may not necessarily be the best solution for what we have learned today. So for the semester project, each of you has been assigned a factory that needs their facilities modernized. As this launch shows us that someone can achieve 40 percent efficiency gains in an industry that is forward facing, we are hoping similar results can be achieved by upgrading these facilities control systems. This semester, you must find a way to increase the efficiency of one system in this factory. The larger the increase gained, the better your score will be." Professor Chun said handing them slips of paper with their assigned factory on it. Monday and Wednesday classes will be for instruction of new material, Fridays will be reserved for you to work on your projects. We are of course here to help with guidance, but the work must be your own." he explained before launching into his lecture about coding.

Eric launched himself into the project, arriving as soon as the factory he had been assigned opened. The manager eager to show him everything as they had a dozen different machines inside that were clearly not working anywhere near their maximum output. He enjoyed the tour as the manager explained how the different machines all worked on making the one product they were known for, but had lost 30 percent of their output in the last decade. He knew from observation that the machines themselves were in excellent shape, despite being over 25 years old.

The better part was they allowed him to copy the controller systems currently being used for each machine before even giving him an unused workspace for their old IT guy that they had provided the best for. Especially since they didn't want their code leaving the building.

In less than an hour he had gone through the code of the machine they relied on most, debugging the commands that had crept in over the last decade. He showed them that it was causing issues and reducing the efficiency of that series of machines by 15 percent.

They launched it, the system reboot taking 20 minutes while the men who ran that part of the line were at lunch. Once they restarted however the result was immediate in the first hour as they reclaimed the 20 percent efficiency they had lost in it while the Manager whistled because of it.

"How long do you think it will take you?" he asked as Eric looked at him.

"Mr. White, the code for these machines now is open source as they are over 25 years old. Working on in it only here, it will take me all semester just to debug your machinery. That could give you a 20 percent increase in efficiency in that alone. However, if you allowed me to take the current code home and rewrite it, I might be able to launch a completely new control system for them and get an overall increase of 30-35 percent." he answered honestly giving it his assessment as the old man nodded.

"Do what you need to do Mr. Knight, if you can do this within a few hours, I want to see what you can do in a full semester without restraint." Franklin White said before allowing Eric to leave with the external hard drive he had copied everything on to.

Within a week he had debugged the machines inside his assigned factory, the increase gain of 22 percent almost exactly what he had predicted as the entire factory increased its output speed to what it had been 10 years earlier.

At the same time, Hellen and Peter were struggling to stay afloat with all the new orders of their restaurant management system that literally cut the license fees in half to do the same job far better than even the premium systems on the market. Every restaurant that was serious about their business was ordering it, quickly shooting their numbers to over 50,000 restaurants that used it within the first month.

Eric however wasn't even interested in it right now, as his part of the project was now complete, Dimitry more than impressed with how well it actually helped him manage the restaurant. He saw all the reports about the expansion of clients, services offered, employee hires, all of it. He also didn't care enough to interfere as his workload in school was keeping him busy when he wasn't working for the restaurant. Especially as the project for the factory took an interesting turn when he was able to fully reprogram the first machine series in a matter of just two weeks.

What he hadn't expected was that instead of the 10 percent increase in efficiency, he removed an unintended throttling of the machine that restricted it to half of its rated capacity. Turning it up to 70 percent which is was more than happy with as it seemed to remove several quality headaches the company had been experiencing, but it nearly doubled their output making the total efficiency gains nearly 70 percent.