Where enterprise systems started for me
I joined Pinnacle as a consultant and quickly moved into technical writing, professional services and eventually sales. One of the fastest ways I found to learn the platform properly was to rewrite its manuals, which meant understanding the logic across the entire product rather than memorising isolated screens.
Pinnacle had five tightly connected modules covering areas such as asset management, vendor management, financial management and procurement. It was effectively an integrated enterprise platform before ERP became the label everybody used.
How I learned
Rewriting the manuals forced me to understand not just what the software did, but why the process existed and how each module related to the others. That combination of product depth and operational context became the foundation for the way I worked in later presales and solution roles.
The progression
Designing the mobile work experience
Pinnacle was also where I first became involved in designing mobile work execution around the people actually doing the job. I helped design the UX, workflow and operating process for the mobile solution rather than approaching mobility as a smaller version of the desktop application.
The work required translating maintenance, asset, procurement and field processes into an interface that made sense away from a desk: what information a worker needed in the field, what could be captured at the point of work, and how that activity should feed back into the wider enterprise system.
What still matters
Pinnacle was a technically strong product. Its eventual direction was shaped as much by ownership and strategy as by product quality. That lesson has stayed with me: good technology still needs the right operating model, market context and strategic home.