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S.C. Johnson Goes With Custom-Tools
Job Growth Poses Productivity Challenge, Analysts Warn
Upgrades:  Are They Worth It?
 

ComputerWorld Canada

S.C. Johnson Goes With Custom-Tools

Off-the-shelf software just didn’t cut it when reaching out to top-tier customers (by Rebecca Reid on January 21, 2005)

Finding the right software to solve a specific business need can be frustrating. When companies can’t find anything off-the-shelf, they have another option — custom-developed software.

That’s the path S.C. Johnson and Son Ltd.’s Canadian subsidiary, S.C. Johnson Canada, in Brantford, Ont. took when it wanted to speed up the way the company’s salespeople accessed information about its top customers.

“When we looked at off-the-shelf [products], none even came close to what I needed,” explained Tim Mulroney, director of sales at S.C. Johnson. That’s when it commissioned Insidus Corp., in Richmond Hill, Ont., to build a program tailored to S.C. Johnson’s needs. Mulroney said the functionality S.C. Johnson required was not available in any commercial off-the-shelf-software (COTS).

The primary advantage to custom-built software is customers get a program that is customized to fit their business process and can create items like special reports and charts, said Lubo Zizakovic, president of Insidus.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) like Oracle Corp. and SAP AG create software applications that are packed with tons of features that are targeted at a wide audience, Zizakovic explained.

For example, if an ISV creates a health care application to track patient records, different organizations will use it differently and not everyone will use the same features, he said.

Before it deployed the custom-build program, Market Manager, S.C. Johnson had a lot of customer data tied up in Excel spreadsheets. It had about 25 salespeople who used these spreadsheets to keep track of what products each of its customers were selling, Mulroney said.

If Mulroney wanted to find out, for example, which S.C. Johnson products were sold by Wal-Mart and how this data had changed over a given period of time, he would have needed to examine about 25 spreadsheets to find the right information, potentially taking hours, he said. Now he said it takes only a few clicks and about five seconds to get at the right information. S.C. Johnson sells about 250 household products including the brands Windex, Ziploc and Glade.

New product releases by S.C. Johnson are always preceded by marketing campaigns to generate interest, but the firm found that sometimes its retail distributors were not committed to selling these new products. This meant that eager customers searching for the latest product often left the stores empty-handed. Market Manager lets S.C. Johnson keep track of information about what its customers are selling and at what price. The program will also notify the user — by a red flag — if a user stops selling a product or is selling the product much lower or higher than the recommended retail price.

Market Manager went live eight months ago and Mulroney said it is outstanding.

To help users learn the program, Insidus includes a comprehensive learning and self-help program with each software package it creates.

One thing that particularly helped the project’s success was Insidus’ ability to understand S.C. Johnson’s business. Insidus was not the first custom-software developer S.C. Johnson commissioned to solve this problem but it was the only successful one, Mulroney said. Other firms had failed because they made them too complicated by trying to incorporate too many systems, he explained.

Insidus takes a piecemeal approach to development by first understanding busi­ness needs.

As the project progresses, Insidus shows customers sections of the program as they are completed so they can provide input about its architecture. In the case of S.C. Johnson, Mulroney said Insidus’ Zizakovic got it right about 80 per cent of the time.

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National Post Article 1

Job Growth Poses Productivity Challenge, Analysts Warn

Martin sees strength (by Eric Beauchesne on May 27, 2002)

    OTTAWA - Paul Martin, the Finance Minister, will point to stunning job growth as evidence of strength in a state of the economy presentation to a Commons finance committee next month, but it may also be evidence of its greatest challenge.
    Canada is getting a lot more jobs, while the United States is getting a lot more productive, analysts noted yesterday.
    Their comments came as Mr. Martin confirmed he will appear before the finance committee June 11 to outline the progress of the economic recovery since his December budget.
    The budget, using private sector forecasts, projected growth of only 1.1% this year in the Canadian economy and the same in the United States.
    However, the growth in both economies has surged since and both are now expected to post growth this year of three percent or more.
    “While GDP growth rates are quite similar between the two countries, the big difference is that Canada is hiring extra people to produce the output, while the U.S. is managing to do it with productivity gains alone,” said Nesbitt Burns economist Douglas Porter.
    “That’s cause for concern,” added Don Drummond, TD Bank chief economist and Martin’s former associate deputy minister.
    “Once again there’s that phenomenal productivity performance going on in the U.S. and if we’re going to use them as our comparative base, then we’re going to have to do a lot better on the productivity front,” Mr. Drummond said.
    The government has launched an Innovation Agenda aimed at lifting Canada’s lagging living standards closer to those in the United States through increased productivity.  Most economists expect that Statistics Canada figures being released Friday will show the economy grew at an annual pace of 5% to 6% in the first quarter, roughly in line with the 5.6% in the United States.
    But the Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, in justifying the decision to start raising interest rates in advance of the U.S. Federal Reserve, argued Canada’s recovery is healthier because spending has been driving the growth while the rebuilding of inventories has been behind much of the U.S. expansion.
    Nesbitt Burns’ Mr. Porter noted, however, if exports are also stripped out of the growth figures, the actual increase in domestic spending, a reflection of the internal health of each country’s economies, is about the same.
    “How much money will it save me - and how soon?”  That question is foremost in the minds of many business owners these days as they carefully consider how much more they should invest in technology to solve their business problems.
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National Post Article 2

Upgrades:  Are They Worth It? (by Geof Wheelwright on May 13, 2002)

Business analysts put dollar value on technology

The problem is there is seldom anyone within the company qualified to provide the answer.  Many companies seemed to have reached their limits for engineers and programmers.  What they really need now are people who can help develop and communicate technology-based solutions to meet the challenges created by the current economic uncertainties.
    These people - sometimes known as business analysts - speak the language of the chief executive rather than geek-speek.  Most of us have probably seen the television commercial in which the CEO stops the consultant in mid-sentence and asks him what he is talking about.  The consultant stops and thinks for a moment before saying that every dollar the CEO spends on a new technology today will save him $2 a year from now.  Now that’s something any business person can appreciate. 
    The special skill offered by business analysts is their ability to go into a company, spend time with its people to determine needs and then create a technology-based solution that really helps that company and has an identifiable return on investment (ROI) within a fixed time.
    Chief executives of technology companies, as well as consultants, are now going out of their way to let customers know they will either provide such people to their customers or work with their customer’s business analysts to show the worth of their solutions and submit to the inclusion of rigorous ROI specifications within their contracts.
    Consider the comments made by Carly Fiorina, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, at last month’s Accenture Global Convergence Forum in Monte Carlo.  The theme of the conference was “From Vision to Value: Getting Back to Basics,” and it was clear Ms. Fiorina and other technology company CEOs are getting the message that customers want to see real, measurable value from their investments sooner rather than later and that technology companies must provide ways of helping achieve that goal.  “People want to get more out of their IT investments, and they are being told to do more with what they already have,” she said.  “For the first time, we [technology companies] are not driving the tech agenda, customers are driving it.”  Joe Forehand, CEO of technology consulting firm Accenture, agrees technology companies must do a better job of understanding and reacting to the real business needs of their  customers.  “Customer insight is at the forefront of how companies will need to compete and survive in the next decade,” he said.
    Sanjay Kumar, CEO of software giant Computer Associates, said at his company’s recent CA World conference in Orlando, Fla., that gaining customer insight and developing the business analysis to really create ROI for customers sometimes involves a lot more than just talking to them.
    He cited the process his company recently went through to develop a solution for retail powerhouse Wal-Mart during which CA staff spent time working as Wal-Mart cash register operators, warehouse employees and even as part of the clean-up crew mopping up the floors after the store closed for the day.  “There is an opportunity in the area of getting a faster and more definite return on results [for customers],” said Mr. Kumar.
    For those who actually do this kind of business analysis, the issues faced by companies in the current economic climate are acute.  David Stothart, CEO of Vancouver-based consulting and software development firm Scionet Technologies Inc., says many businesses have become technology-shy after a litany of projects that over-promised and under-delivered.
    “Technology for the sake of technology is not the answer,” he said.  “In previous years, technology projects were initiated for what they could provide, without a true cost-benefit analysis.  People were sold on the image of technology.  The reality rarely lived up to it.”
    Mr. Stothart also points out that far too many technology implementations were a way of allowing “empire building” within the information technology services group of a company and that it sometimes takes the participation of an outside business analyst to help deal with that issue.
    “Good business analysts can provide essential objectivity.  It is not simply a case of understanding how to effectively assess the benefits of any project or the ability to communicate business requirements in a format useful to the technical division,”  he said.  “External analysts can remain unaffected by the politics and pre-existing relationship issues and focus solely on the task at hand.”
    Whether a company opts to hire its own business analyst or prefers to outsource the expertise, there may be another option: Such analysis is now even being built into solutions sold by some software companies such as the Pivotal Results program recently introduced by Vancouver customer relationship management software firm Pivotal Corp.
    The program allows customers to work with Pivotal to set goals and measure results and create a contract that allows both sides to share the risk and reward resulting from the extent to which Pivotal’s solution meets stated targets for return on investment.
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