Getting the Most Out of Your Technology & Tools

June 15th, 2010 § Leave a Comment

A friend recently related to me how frustrated he was that his veterinary practice wasn’t using their new software to its fullest extent. With a little research, I found this article and sent it over to him.

Though the article addressed issues for packages that have already been selected and implemented, I was reminded of how many similarities there were with  software implementations, whether a new accounting package, small business suite, an e-Commerce solution, a CRM product or medical / veterinary practice management software. In particular, why so many of them fail to live up to their potential.

Large, build or buy, software projects or organization transformation initiatives, can have large teams dedicated to their success and there is still an estimated 50% failure rate for projects to deliver results as measured against original expectations. Experts have found that increasing the success rate means breaking down the project into manageable pieces.

The same concept can be applied to technology selection and implementation for small to mid-sized businesses and I have highlighted below the steps that can be followed to increase your chance of a success. If you feel these steps are beyond your organization to complete, engage a consultant before you begin your project to help avoid the frustration that can result from a difficult implementation.

1. Define Your Objectives

Why are you considering this solution and what are the problems or missed opportunities you wish to address? Answering this question and communicating the answer to key users of the new technology will validate your expectations for the solution. At a minimum, their early involvement will help you identify which of the users will be early adopters (your new champion) and those that may have a more difficult time accepting the new technology.

Key Deliverable: Software Replacement Objectives

2. Document Your Requirements

Before you evaluate different options, identify which processes and reports are critical to your operations and document how you use your current software / tools. This will serve as a basis for you to compare new technology options and ensure that your critical requirements can be met by your new solution. These critical processes should include an outline of new features you need to solve the existing shortcomings.

Key Deliverable: Process Documentation and Requirements

3. Evaluate Your Options

The requirements and processes you have previously defined can serve as the basis for you and your key users to evaluate the technology, whether software packages, web based services or even cloud computing options available to you. Technology reviews are plentiful on the Internet and in particular, user forums can be reviewed to identify recurring issues with packages or hosted platforms. If you are planning on using a package solution, you may also want to engage a technical consultant at this stage to determine whether your existing environment can properly support its use. For a web service or cloud solution, you may wish to further investigate data privacy and security issues that could impact your use of the option.

Key Deliverable: Solution Selection

4. Train Your Key Users

When you have selected the technology that you feel is the best fit, either the vendor or other training experts can be engaged to teach your key users the best ways to use the new solution. The users should have been introduced to it in the previous steps, and if you have also included them in the selection decision, it will go a long way to their acceptance and enthusiasm for the new product. While they are training they can update the process documentation to reflect either screen shots or software tips, to help define how to use the solution in your business context. If engaging the vendor or trainer is outside of your budget, have your champion work through the existing manual, wikis, help forums, blogs or corresponding ‘Dummies‘ or ‘Missing Manuals‘ type books, to support their efforts to generate the documentation. They in turn, can help other users adapt to the new technology and processes. Users learn at different rates and having a reference document could make the difference for less adaptive users in accepting the changes.

Key Deliverable: Training Manual and Updated Process Documentation

5. Monitor and Update Your Processes

Once you go live, try weekly update meetings with key users to check on how they are using the solution and whether their processes, or the setup, needs to be adjusted to meet their needs. These updates can be tapered down to monthly as your users become more comfortable with the solution and as you begin to see the benefits realized from the new technology.

Key Deliverable: Ongoing Feedback Mechanism and Process Audit

At the end of these steps, key users have assisted you with implementing the right solution for your problems or opportunities. Additionally, your updated documentation should reflect your organization’s specific processes, helping you utilize the solution you have selected more effectively.

Which e-Commerce solution should we choose?

May 25th, 2010 § 1 Comment

Whether you are starting a new social enterprise or reevaluating your current business platform, one of the most important decisions you will make concerns your choice of an e-commerce solution.

Fully hosted, or web service based, providers are seemingly everywhere and may offer you additional start up support by providing assistance with domain name registration, website design, as well as set up of a merchant account, payment gateway and credit card processing. This is over and above their web hosting and shopping cart solutions and can be a great starting place for first-time store owners.

Other standard features should include SEO optimization (friendly URLs that don’t mask your product pages from search engines), simplified checkout (to help avoid abandoned carts), fraud protection and help support.

On top ten reviews, my starting place for most software evaluation, their team has reviewed 15 different e-commerce providers. The reason I consider this a starting place is that while some features are fairly standard across the top solutions, the ones that aren’t may have important implications for the type of store you are running. Examples of these differentiating factors include:

  • How sensitive are you to bandwidth charges? Volusion is less expensive in their basic monthly fee, however, a google search reveals many user complaints about excessive bandwidth charges. If you anticipate heavy traffic to your site, or you require content rich descriptions in your product pages, this may quickly become an issue for you.
  • How important is custom design to you? If differentiation for your site is tied to its look and feel, or you have established a brand with your existing design, you may want to carefully consider the design templates offered. While coreCommerce offers fewer standard design templates, they also offer the option to alter the CSS for their templates, providing you with more control over them. coreCommerce also allows you to integrate their shopping cart by connecting it to your existing website.
  • How many products and product attributes do you require? Some providers have limits on the number of products and when you read the fine print, they may also count each variant of a product against these limits.
  • How much content management do you need? Many providers have some level of content management built-in, however, they may also restrict how many content pages you can publish or whether you can nest them at different levels. More fully featured, built-in, Content Management Systems can offer Blogs, Chat, statistics, newsletters, auto-responder e-mails, multi-language support, WYSIWYG editors, FAQ sections and product support forums. Identifying which are important to you may weed out some solutions.
  • What marketing options do you require? If Gift Cards or Certificates are a critical marketing tool for you, or gift wrapping a critical service, make sure your provider has this built-in. Other discount options, preferred member pricing, and shipping promotions may also be important to your business.
  • Do you have wholesale or Business 2 Business clients? B2B support could include a private area where you can sell goods at wholesale prices, or even have different prices or product options for different vendors. Often this may not be in the basic package, but included at a premium package that you can upgrade to.
  • How easy is the solution to maintain? Most providers have simplified templates to update product information, however, if your products change frequently, you may also require bulk update capability for product information or product images.
  • Does the solution have integrated inventory management and if so, to what level? In my mind, nothing is more frustrating for a customer than to finally select a product, only to have it unavailable at checkout or worse, have a message sent after purchase that the order cannot be completed.
  • Can it be integrated with your peripheral software? Most options allow integration with packages such as Quickbooks or Stone Edge Order Management, ultimately saving you time and allowing you to run your business more effectively.

The good news is that if you dig a bit deeper past the reviews and go directly to the vendor sites, you can often obtain more detail about these features, and most even offer demos or one month free to evaluate their functionality.

If these providers can’t meet your needs, you may want to consider a more customized option. Magento is a fully featured, open source platform (Drupal) that is extremely powerful and can grow with your business. The issue with it for new store owners or small businesses, may be that in order to use more advanced features, such as gift certificates and Business 2 Business functionality, you must purchase the enterprise version at $8,900 (US) per year. Additionally, you will require set up assistance and there will be ongoing support costs and dependancies on outside providers associated with this. There are some great examples of Magento sites, including the ones showcased on their site.

In short, spending the time (20 to 40 hours depending on the complexity of your store) to evaluate your needs in detail against features offered by providers could help you avoid frustration, or worse, abandoned carts and lost sales opportunities.

What is BPM and How Can it Work for Us?

April 12th, 2010 § Leave a Comment

Throughout the web, there are many different definitions about what Business Process Management, or BPM, is. One of the versions I preferred is extracted from Wikipedia, and states:

‘As a managerial approach, BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a “change capability” to an organization – both human and technological.’

More simply put, BPM workflow defines the electronic routing of tasks based on established rule sets. Once defined, these rule sets and tasks can be readily updated, allowing businesses to nimbly adapt to changes in their operating environment. This may be of particular relevance for routine, back office processes such as invoicing and claims processing, but also for processes that are  required to meet regulatory requirements, as Managers can monitor and report on process compliance.

In addition, some of the specific benefits that may be achieved, include the ability to:

  • Automate time consuming manual business processes;
  • Improve operational efficiency;
  • Make business processes consistent and streamlined;
  • Optimize complex business processes;
  • Reduce processing costs; and
  • Benefit from remote access to business processes.

In my previous post on documenting your processes, I mentioned several affordable options for Business Process Management. As most of the options were shown based on their offering of free process modeling tools, I’ve updated the list of BPM software to include additional Open Source options.

There were two main packages that I found in the open source BPM market, Intalio|BPM Community Edition and ProcessMaker.

Intalio was originally in the enterprise market for it’s full BPM suite, and opened up it’s community edition in 2006. The community edition is offered for free, and includes their Intalio|Designer and Intalio|Server components, training and support are offered for a price. While this suite is a robust solution for an organization, I would be concerned about recommending it to my small to mid-sized clients. The potential learning curve and the cost to train employees (which runs from 1,350 to 2,500 based on their training offered in Portland – the closest choice to my native Vancouver) may not be palatable to them.

The business model for ProcessMaker is similar though I found their free user community and wiki site more extensive than Intalio and their training was webinar based and less expensive at $995 US.

Additional open source BPM platforms include:

These choices were more oriented towards software development and would likely not be as applicable for my clients.

Of the Open Source options above, I have chosen to further evaluate ProcessMaker, as I feel it offers the most user friendly and accessible on-line training options. As stated previously, TIBCO Business Studio remains my current favourite for entry level (and beyond) BPM.

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