DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for the ‘Recession Proofing Technology’ Category

Successful Business owners and senior managers share an ‘efficiency mindset’. In everything they do, they seek the most cost effective method and look to maximize ROI at every stage. Following on from the Global Financial crisis, managers have been put under unprecedented pressure to lean up their business and every cent of every dollar of expenditure has been put under scrutiny. This flurry of cost reduction activity has caused some senior managers to become somewhat over excited. The mindset has moved from ‘doing more with less’ to one of simply survival.

The biggest problem with this mindset it that sooner or later when the economy does turnaround, your business needs to be fit enough to survive the feeding frenzy that will ensue. It may be attractive to cut suppliers or reduce your headcount now but what does that do for your operational effectiveness. Is your business really capable of reacting to a spike in demand?

Managers are therefore on the lookout for cost reduction strategies that can save money now but have more long term operational effectiveness.

One area that CFO’s and COO’s look towards are business process improvements initiatives. By analyzing the processes in a business and ‘re-engineering’ them, substantial cost savings can be realized and in the process, making the business more effective and agile.

The benefits of Business process improvements are well known and acknowledged but they are largely thought about as long term initiatives. Most CFO’s view business process improvement initiatives as an exercise that will take a minimum of 6 months to implement and it’s not uncommon for projects to blow out to two or even three years. In this current economic climate, many ‘C’ level executives are overly focused on short term initiatives and rule out business process engineering before they have really had a chance to consider it.

The reason that this is such flawed logic is that Business Process engineering doesn’t have to take this long. Modern days consulting houses such as Synoptic document, analyse and re-engineer a business process in only 5 – 8 days. Exactly, how they do this is beyond the scope of this article but the time-frame is involved is what is most important to understand.

Next, having established our “to –be†processes a vehicle is needed to ‘operationalise’ the changes. Again, based on previous experience ‘C’ level executives perceive Software implementations as both longwinded and costly affairs and sadly some of the best intentioned projects never see the light of day.

Software development has moved on in leaps and bounds in recent times which means that ‘C’ Level executives need to takes a revised view what is possible with modern software development toolsets.

One such toolset is SEBA from Solentive. Rather than start from scratch with each new development, a licensed version of their software development ‘chassis’ is made available. This means that timeframe and budgets for the implementation of new business processes are reduced with dramatic effect.

A tool set is made available to Managers or ‘business process owners’ to allow them to build or modify business processes as they change. What the manager perceives as a business process in their management application is viewed as a series of screens for the end user at the shop floor level.

Furthermore, through a powerful combination of workflow and business rules engine technology, SEBA can guide the user to make more cost effective decisions at decision points along the path of the process.

By combining the best of both of these approaches, ‘C’ Level executives could potentially move from mapping to implementation of business processes in less than 14 days. This can be very attractive to a manager who is looking to refine business processes and see a rapid return on their investment.

More business technology articles by David Birchall can be discovered at http://www.davidbirchall.bircko.com

Apologies for the quiet time. I’ve been in the UK VFR (Visiting friends and relatives for non-tourism academics)

On returning to Solentive I was excited to find that the team have been putting the finishing touches on our new Support and Maintenence program. This has been something we have been considering for sometime and have prioritised in recent months due to a steady steam of related enquiries.

The new support and maintenance program goes as follows… There are two main areas to get your head around.

Firstly, there is the Solentive Support Agreement – Should your system encounter an error, your staff can rely on Solentive to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest actions to remedy the situation. You as the customer can then task you own staff, a third party vendor or Solentive to take action using the SDP.

Secondly, there is the Solentive Development Pack  (SDP) which is prepayed blocks of credit to be used for bug fixes, minor upgrades and patches.

Turn around SLA’s are available for both parts depending how business critical the system is.

One of the biggest distractions for IT teams is in the maintenence of legacy systems. A system error is almost impossible to plan for and has a habit or coming along at the just the wrong moment, putting your other deliverables in jeopardy.

The support and development packs are a methaphorical panadol for an IT headache that you no longer need to have. By removing the burden of maintenance you can plan your resources more effectively or reduce the associated overheads associated with such a large team.

Much rivalled and often debated programming languages PHP and .NET have seemingly been brought a step closer together by the development of a new compilation tool from Jadu.

The tool, called Phallanger has been developed by Jadu and will allow the compilation of well known and well used open source technologies to be compiled into an executable which paves the way for further development using the Microsoft framework.

The uptake for this product is thought to be high as customers welcome the breakdown in barriers associated with the long running battle between the Microsoft .NET framework and the open source community.

Customers can now benefit from a lean delivery and the best of both worlds.

More information

The compiler

Have you used the tool? What are your impressions? Comment back with your thoughts…

I don’t know whats wrong with me this week. I just don’t seem to be able to resist the urge to write overly dramatic headlines. This one came from a weird train of thought I found myself having in a daydream like fashion on the way into work

Could we be at such a point in the ‘information age’ that if we haven’t automated your business by now, then you stand to fade away into the background wondering what happened.?

Quickly I realised that the answer was no. Stupid thought really. In fact I think we are some way away from it from many of us, but I then payed some more serious attention to a bigger question. If it IS coming, when will that day be?

In many ways we have technology available to us that is only limited by either our imagination or our courage to act. We are able to automate things that managers wouldn’t ever dream were possible. Its only our ignorance that prevents us from benefiting.

Some further food for thought. Since some businesses are find things tough right now… Imagine if you were able to automate some or all of what you did. You knew your customers better, you served customers better. Your service levels were better. Perhaps everything was better

Imagine if only you had the secret. Imagine how the competition would marvel at how you did it. Perhaps its not such a distant dream after all?

Grow in a slowdown and reduce your headcount…  Wow did I just say reduce your headcount. Erm what I meant to say was ‘streamline your operations’ or ‘reduce you reliance in manual processes’.

Come on lets get real. There are some businesses out there that need to reduce costs right now and quickly. No-one likes loosing good people but its a harsh reality of business at the moment.

Whether this is part of your cost reduction strategy or not Business Process Automation is an important component in creating a leaner meaner fighting machine to weather the Recession storm that is now upon us and forecast to deepen.

We have recently put the finishing touches on our workflow automation ‘core’ we should really put some thought into giving it a fancy title shouldn’t we? We have been using this to connect to a businesses existing systems as a way of both monitoring the traffic of the workflow as well as having the ‘intelligence’ to assign task to other users. The intelligence in question is a series of business rule unique to your business.

Lets pick an industry. Say Logistics. A consignment is entered into the system for pick up and the system calculates the closest vehicle to pick it up. In its calculation the following rules are considered

The system automatically notifies the driver, The driver accepts the job and the system texts the customer to confirm confirmation.

The rules in question are applicable to any industry but in this example we have built business logic into the role of Transport operations manager. The actions taken by the system are compliant with the companies policies for late pick up. The manager can handle more work and can focus time on account management or driver liaison which are more humanistic tasks.

If you need more clarification on Business Process Automation and what it can do for your business. Drop me a line. 0432 968684

What is a BRE?

The Business Rules Engine (BRE) is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. A BRE can be used in Business Process Automation to significantly streamline the operational efficiency in a business.

A modern BRE is best thought of a rule management system. The rules of a business can change as the business grows or evolves. Certain rules may be applicable within a certain timeframe for example and therefore Business rules need to be updated and managed with the changing needs of the business.

The BRE can be used as a vehicle to translate ‘business logic’ into information workflows.

What are Business Rules?

Rules are everywhere. In fact a good business is valued or assessed on its systems, policies and procedures. These can also be known as business rules.

Business rules are visible in all businesses from SMB to Corporate. If you are able to document and map your business rules, you stand a good chance of significantly increasing the efficiency of your business through software and automation of some of your business processes.

The following table provides examples of some of the rules that might effect decisions in various industries.

You will notice that all business rules can be summarised into two categories

Either IF – THEN statements or IF – THEN – ELSE statements

The IF – THEN statement is also known as an inference rule and can be used to look up make decisions such as ‘Should this customer be approved for a mortgage?’ by executing rules of the form “IF some-condition THEN allow-customer-a-mortgage”. They can also be used to create fact tables which may allow the system to statements such as. If the conditions are ‘wet’ and the vehicle is over 1.5 tonnes, then the maximum permitted speed is 40 kph in populated areas.

The other condition, the IF – THEN- ELSE statement is also referred to as an ‘Event Condition Action’ rule.

Modern Rules Engines can really be considered rule management systems. For instance our rules engine provides a rule authoring environment, as well as a server, testing environment and library. Effectively a library of rules can be written, reused, activated and deactivated over time.

The rules are no longer in the control of a programmer but a business analyst who can write or modify the rules in Domain Specific Language (DSL). This means that the rules are written in a language that is industry specific rather than code.

How can is it used?

Our BRE can be used as part of a customworkflow solution or a part of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in unison with Biztalk.

A interesting application for a BRE could in the automation of a help desk functionality. Where a large knowledge base exists, the BRE can be used to understand where the knowledge base is applicable through rules.

More reasons to use a BRE…

Every business is different Our rules engine is may deliver some or all of the following benefits.

·
Drastically
reduce development time and costs

o
From
5000 lines of code in C# to 150 lines of code in the BRE.

·
Significantly
reduce maintenance cost.

·
Change
business rules on the fly – less change requests and less programming!

·
Build
a faster more reactive business systems.

·
Protect
data consistency by using a BRE to handle complex calculations.

·
Remove
manual Processes where possible

·
Allocate
human resources to more humanistic tasks.

·
Free
up your overstretched IT department.

Need to know more?

If you need to know more or have any questions about how BRE can help your business, feel free to contact us.

Another successful implementation for us and this time the customer is…. US! You know the old adage about plumbers with leaky taps, well our own CRM was a long time coming but well and truely worth the wait. I have used a number of CRM’s in my Sales career including the usual suspects such as ACT!, Filemaker and Salesforce and SugarCRM. This is by far the most exciting CRM I have used to date. Thats right – I said exciting!

So what’s all the fuss about? Well for me good technology is technology that makes my life easier. If you know me, you may know that I am the first person to feel the urge to shout expletives or feel the urge to throw things at your monitor when things don’t go my way. It’s therefore refreshing when something comes along that works right away.

Now before I give a 100% thumbs up rating, I should add here that the engineer that installed the system had a few ‘challenging moments.’ The installation is for an experienced software engineer and Microsoft prefer that they are CRM certified.

But lets down to the business end of the application… Firstly, as a user you have some choices to make. Do you want to view the CRM in a seperate environment such as a web browser or would you prefer to view all of your information in Outlook? This comes by way of an Outlook tool bar which not only tracks important email in CRM but also gives you access to everything that I can think of a singular, familiar interface. I haven’t tried it, but I expect I could spend my entire day within outlook without ever having to leave.

I expect there are few people out there that don’t have some experience in outlook and familiarising yourself with Dynamics CRM is no more difficukt than reading your email. A full history of clients is easily accessible and the ‘story’ of our client contact can be accessed within a few clicks.

One of the real beauties however is the ease with which data was imported and campaigns could be put together. CRM easily merges with word and outlook which makes a direct mail, or personalised email news letter with a follow up call acheiveable within a few screens in the quick campaigns wizard.

Workflows can be automated and configured from within the application and custom fields can be added by your average line manager rather than the ‘IT guy.’ All of the usual reports can be accessed as standard and addition reports can be authored easily.

We have only had dynamics CRM live in our office for a few weeks but already we are starting understand mor about our customers that we imagined possible in such a short space of time.

Beyond all this, there’s an enormous amount of functionality that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play with so expect to hear more in the coming weeks. I may even do a quick video on this in the next few weeks. If you want to know more about how CRM can fit your team, feel free to get in contact.

Apologies for using the dreaded ‘R’ word but since the mainstream media seems hell bent on using it, I figure a niche blog isn’t going to make that much difference.

So, I attended a seminar during the week on recession proof marketing. The key lessons from this event was that that regardless of whether you thing the “R” is coming, the fundamental principles of marketing remain more important now than ever.

1) First of all the Unique Selling Proposition is key. Personally I have always like the idea of  an unfair advantage over a USP but thats splitting hairs.

2) Most importantly, it’s important to focus on the acquisition and retention of customers. I know this sounds obvious but when we really stop and think about this in more detail, we can all do this a hell of alot better

Firstly, When is the last time you spoke to your entire past customer database with a  new proposition? How often do you talk to them? How much did it cost the business to bring them on board … and how often do they hear from you.

At my place of work we have taken this idea several steps further again. In unison with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have developed AMS (Automated Marketing System) Not only does this fulfill all of our email marketing needs from a legal and technical persective, but it can also decide what messages to send to the customer depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

The system has built in logic to assess where they are in their relationship with us and will move the ‘lead’ to the appropriate next status ie from a ‘suspect’ to a ‘prospect’.

This has been a great way to reach new customers and is much more effective than cold calling for new business.  With our steady trickle of leads, we can turn our sales team into more of a production line. Some or our staff raise contracts and write proposals, some people are customer facing. Some people are more focused on solutions and technical requirements and so on.

Since each task is matched to the right skill set and pay scale, we benefit from cost savings here too.  So why am I telling you this? Well because if we can do this for us, we can do this for you too… that is if you are open to the possibilities.