March 29th, 2009
Lately I have been advising a very large organization about E-mail campaign management. Their hierarchical nature makes this an interesting problem, not to mention that each local entity (chapter) has its own vision of how to do things.
This organization really understands communication and has gone to great lengths to empower its local chapters. From my interactions, I have discovered that the local chapters are using about half a dozen different E-mail solutions including MS Outlook, Yahoo Groups, ConstantContact, iContact, etc. to meet their needs. Somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 messages are sent by each local chapter every month. The organization wants to build a historical content-read profile of each recipient.
Clearly what started out as a quick solution to a need (desire to communicate) has quickly become a company-wide challenge. The local chapters selected point-solutions….some use Outlook, others went and subscribed to hosted E-mail services; yet others turned to Yahoo! Groups to help.
Lessons Learned: (a) Never underestimate the ability of empowered individuals to make choices to get things done; and more importantly from the perspective of this blog, (b) Point solutions to specific problems almost always become a limitation to collaboration and collective growth down the road.
By the latter I don’t mean that point solutions are irrelevant, it’s just that there comes a time when you have to throw out the “current-way” of doing things in favor of a more robust and scalable solution that will improve effectiveness across an entire organization. This is why I like NetSuite.
Posted in Business, NetSuite | No Comments »
March 27th, 2009
Imagine, it is 2010 and you are in a meeting with your IT manager about the challenges that she is having keeping everything work nicely. Department managers are not very happy about the state of information sharing. Your business has grown by leaps and bounds during the last five years. Granted 2009 was tough, but you survived, and now are nicely profitable again.
Here is the technology landscape – your sales team uses Salesforce.com. Your marketing team uses Mailchimp and an enterprise content management solution. Your email runs on a hosted MS Exchange solution, provided by your ISP. Your accounting department and manufacturing run on QuickBooks Enterprise along with Fishbowl Inventory. You are thinking of selling your widgets online and discussing this with your channel partners.
Despite your best efforts to stay up to date, your internal technology position is compromised. Your sales team uses Excel for expense reports, commissions are calculated in spreadsheets, your partners want online access and accounting is not very happy with the revenue recognition process. Quite frequently, customer information is not fully in-sync between support and sales. The support staff is frequently caught off-guard.
You made all the right choices along the way….you chose the best point-solutions available for the task. They all came with an assurance of out-of-the-box inter-operability. So what went wrong? Perhaps it is growing pains, you ask?
Welcome to the world of silos. Point solutions (hosted or licensed software) don’t necessarily make it any easier to communicate with third party products….no matter what the hype. And even when you do end up integrating two products – the questions to ask are many:
• Is there a common back-end for data?
• Will there be multiple data sets for each application?
• Is the sync operation going to be real-time – meaning to support online transactions? If not, then how often will the systems “talk” to each other?
• What effect does the integration have on my business processes? Will you have any increased responsibilities?
• What third-party products (licenses and subscriptions) are required for integration?
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February 11th, 2009
I have been a user of NetSuite since the fall of 2005. Back then I had been looking for software applications that would help me automate key aspects of my business – not Treova – Treova was not born at that time. I needed to automate sales, accounting, inventory and e-commerce functions. Having used salesforce.com, I was convinced that on-demand applications were the way to go for companies like mine. I researched…..called friends…..spoke with other technology experts and discovered that there was only one solution out there – NetSuite – previously known as NetLedger.
From my notes from 2005 – the five things I needed from my software solution were:
Seamless remote access – I had sales team members based in Chicago and Orlando that needed access to the system. Additionally, I traveled at least twice every month.
Multi-channel order management – we were accepting orders from end-users via our website, getting orders via fax and email from sales reps, conducted business with a major retailer that was getting ready to mandate EDI and of course accepted orders over the phone. We also received orders from a major catalog that were in the form of CSV files.
Minimal IT investment – I did not want to fool with managing applications, software patches, OS compatibility, data backups, VPNs and other functions that are quite simply a drain on a small business – it is funny how you get over stuff that is not value-added when you take a business perspective….I started my career in AT&T as a system administrator for Unix and Sun Workstations and wrote a ton of software to automate IT infrastructure functions before moving to software engineering. The success of iPod sums it very nicely - simplicity and completeness are grossly underappreciated!
Integrated E-commerce – You don’t realize the power of automated CRM (customer relationship management) until your customers start to login and re-order on their own and you go whoa! I did not choose NS for customer self-service applications, I chose it because it provided a website and e-commerce capability out of the box.
Sales Force Automation – The system needed to have a way to generate estimates that I could view. Additionally, I needed to see how the sales team was performing and how often we were contacting prospects and customers.
The above were my criteria for selecting NetSuite from a capability perspective - back in 2005. There are of course many other features of NetSuite that I like and have come to appreciate since 2005. And, certainly, there are several things I dislike about NetSuite too. More on these in the weeks to come.
Posted in Business, NetSuite, SaaS | 1 Comment »
