The Open Source Pragmatist

OK - normally I don’t write blogs bashing companies when I have a bad experience, mainly because I don’t have that much time available.   But I had an experience last weekend at a local Target store that can serve as a great lesson on customer service.  So I decided to share it.

The Background

My 12 year old son recently received a Target gift card from a friend for his birthday.   He also received a new Xbox 360 from his parents for his birthday.   Last weekend he decided that he wanted to spend his gift card on the game “HALO 3″, so I took him over to Target to pick it up.

While at Target, we noticed two HALO games in the display case.   One was HALO 3, the other was HALO WARS.   Not being able to tell the difference between the games we asked the Target employee who was working at the Electronics counter about the difference between the two.   We were told that HALO WARS was the ‘newest version’ of the popular game.   What he didn’t tell us was that HALO WARS is a totally different STYLE of game and isn’t anything like the HALO 3 game my son originally wanted.

An hour later, after opening and realizing the difference, we returned to Target to exchange the HALO WARS game for the other version.   That’s where the fun begins.

Make Sure Your Sales Team Knows the Product

Back at the Target store when attempting to return the game we purchased, I was told it couldn’t be exchanged because we had opened the box.   The fact that I had purchased it only an hour before - didn’t matter.   The fact that the sales rep had told me it was the same type of game - didn’t matter.   When I challenged the sales rep to be accountable for the fact that he didn’t warn me it was not the same style of game he simply said - “I don’t know the differences in all the games”.

Don’t you work in the department?  Isn’t it your job to answer customer questions about the products?  If you don’t know, shouldn’t you have asked?

A Blown Chance to Remedy the Situation and Save A Customer

My family spends about $2000/year at this local Target.    Frankly, I’ve always been pretty satisfied with the store.   The service isn’t always great, but the stores are clean, the quality is pretty good, and I can usually find what I’m after quickly.    But since I spend a good bit of money at this store, I’m miffed that the staff isn’t taking responsibility for sticking me with a $40 game and wasting my son’s birthday present.

I decide the best strategy is to speak with the GM of the store.  Surely she will care enough about my business to resolve the conflict.   I understand the software piracy issues and implications - but there are always amicable solutions to any customer problem if you are creative.   Or at least I thought there were…..

After explaining the situation to the GM, and validating it with the employee (who was defensive, but honest about the sequence of events) I was told that “Target’s policy is that no games can be returned once opened.   Even though the employee should have been more informed of the products, there was nothing they she could do”.  Flabbergasted,  I pushed back.   Surely they didn’t want to loose a customer who spends $2K/year over a $40 game because of a ‘policy’.   Surely there is a creative solution.   I can understand the dilemma over the copyright issue so I offered other alternatives:

- Give me the other game and eat it as a loss

- Give me a gift certificate for the lost amount and I’ll buy the correct game

- Give me a coupon for $40 off my next purchase of $200 or more

- Give me $40 worth of underwear or t-shirts

- Donate something to my son’s school

Anything to make me whole and to demonstrate that Target takes accountability for the fact that it’s sales reps should know the products they are selling.

Crickets could be heard…..

I took my worthless, but brand new game down to the local ‘Game Stop’ specialty store.   They gave me trade in credit for it against a new game and, geeks that they are, were appalled that the Target sales rep didn’t know the difference between the two games.   They felt bad enough that they actually gave me an additional discount off of the replacement game!

The next day I found the local Walmart and my family hasn’t been back to Target.   We won’t go back for at least a year.

The Lessons

There are a few good lessons for all of us from this situation.

1) As a consumer buy from people who clearly know the products well.  I won’t be buying games from anyone other than a Game Stop store from this point forward

2) Make sure that your sales people know the products they are selling.    When they make mistakes, teach them to be accountable.    Target could have won me for life if either the sales rep or GM had just been accountable for the situation.   Instead, they lost my business.

3) Be creative.   Sometimes you can’t give the customer exactly what they initially want in a conflict situation.  But it’s important to be creative and find a way protect the relationship.  Good companies teach and encourage their leaders to find mutually beneficial solutions to problems.   The inflexible application of Target’s ‘company policy’ by the GM not only lost my business, but compelled me to create negative PR.

Oh, and I almost forgot -Halo 3 is a fun game to play.    Thanks Game Stop,  we’ll be back to buy more from you in the near future.

Business & Politics, Insight & Thoughts, Uncategorized Add new tag, customer service

“Yes We Can.” The chants have hardly faded and one of the first things the Obama Administration is interested in doing is exploring how the United States government can use open source software rather than rely on proprietary software. The economic downturn that started in October 2008 led to increasingly growing awareness of open source software solutions and how they might be considered as alternatives to proprietary business applications. This awareness and visibility has been given another boost by the publicity being provided it by Obama and his technology team which includes co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNeally.

Government agencies using open source software is not unheard of - it is actually much more common in Europe.  I do not advocate government mandating open source software. On the other hand, I believe that open source can stand on its own merit and I cannot fault the government, or any other organization for that matter, for looking to get the best value for their money.

Open Source has much to offer this President, the nation and enterprises in general and I welcome the growing awareness and popularity of open source software.  Open source is increasingly being adopted by enterprise IT—with even more widespread adoption on the horizon.  In less than five years, many open source vendors have moved from marginal positions to being players worthy of consideration and influential in their own right.

Uncategorized

Compiere Inc., an open source ERP and CRM provider, is growing and getting noticed by key decision makers in the market for ERP applications.  Compiere is the pioneer of open source ERP and is the emerging leader in this application category.  Compiere recently received the award “2008 InfoWorld Bossie Award - Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications“.  As an open source business application, Compiere is an alternative to the traditional proprietary ERP applications like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics.

I have recently evaluated and reviewed Compiere and wanted to outline some of my findings.  I have limited this evaluation of Compiere to some key areas.  For a more exhaustive outline of capabilities and features I would suggest visiting the Compiere website.

Compiere’s solution capabilities span Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  These include the following capabilities:

• Financial Management (Accounting)
• Sales Order Management
• Materials Management (Purchasing)
• Warehouse Management
• Customer Service (Support & Self-Service)

Role-Based User Interfaces

One of the things I liked most about Compiere is its flexibility to adapt to an organization and to the roles within an organization.  Through years of observation, I have found that 80% of ERP users, use about 20% of the features and functionality that are available to them.  Dealing with the confusion this creates has always been a challenge when implementing some of the traditional ERP solutions.  In Compiere, the ability to tailor a user’s online experience in terms of ‘look and feel’ is defined easily using roles.  Roles are easily setup by an administrator, no development is required.  The menus, windows, forms and fields that are available to the user are all determined by the user’s assigned role.  When roles are established, they are specific to a group of user’s tasks and responsibilities ensuring that the users only see what is required to do their job.  Despite a broad array of features and functionality Compiere makes it easy to provide a simple streamlined user interface to your users.  This easily translates into reduced training and support costs.  Amongst complex applications, I have not seen an easier way to do this - Compiere hit this one out of the park.

Adaptability

Compiere employs an innovative model-driven architecture that gives you unprecedented adaptability, speed of deployment and a lower cost of ownership.  I personally think that Compiere is under-selling this particular capability.  The Compiere ‘Application Dictionary’ is a library of business logic meta-data that can be updated or extended to allow an organization to adapt Compiere to fit the unique requirements of their business.  The level and extent of the customization that can be accomplished using the ‘Application Dictionary’ would require significant development time and effort in any other application.  Compiere allows this adaptability while maintaining easy upgradability.  The time and expense this saves during initial implementation as well as during periodic upgrades contributes to the already lower cost of ownership when compared to traditional ERP solutions.

Warehouse Management

Recently released in Compiere 3.2, Compiere offers one of their best modules to date - WMS (Warehouse Management System).  WMS expands an already solid Materials Management module with a broad range of brand new functionality that automates inbound, warehousing and outbound operations.  This is ideal for organizations that are looking to cut costs, improve productivity, reduce warehouse space utilization or increase customer satisfaction.

At the center of the WMS module is a highly flexible and configurable rules engine for setting up intelligent materials movement through all phases of warehouse management operations.  This expansion of the Materials Management module is offered by Compiere for an additional fee per user or per warehouse.  If an organization only requires basic inventory and materials management functionality, I recommend using the functionality included in the Materials Management module at no additional cost - it is solid and mature.  However, for the mid-size to larger organizations in the distribution, retail or manufacturing industries where the warehouse operations are complex, there are numerous warehouses or the number of items and transactions are  high - the advanced functionality provided by WMS is worth the additional cost.  In situations where you may be looking to cut warehousing costs as it relates to warehouse moves and utilization - Compiere’s WMS solution is worth looking at as either an add-on to a larger Compiere implementation or as part of an integrated ERP solution.

Compiere has expanded their network of partners by about 40% in 2008 resulting in a growing ecosystem of knowledgeable and experienced system integrators ready to help with everything from Compiere support and hosting to Compiere implementation and integration.

Uncategorized compiere, erp, open-source, warehouse-management

Consider the scenario. You’re the CIO of a regional distribution company, supporting a “knowledge worker” environment of 200 users spread though 18 warehouses in 7 states. Your accounting team is demanding a flexible and scalable solution that lets them adapt in the face of changing economics and measures. Your warehouse teams are demanding more feature rich Order Management solutions that provide better information at the Point of Sale. Your Sales team is screaming for wireless access to orders and inventory, so they can respond to customer needs in real time…and of course your boss, the CEO, is demanding that you deliver all of the above, on a shoestring budget, and wants a working proof of concept that covers all these solutions - Accounting, Sales and Inventory/Order Management with Wireless…in 3 weeks…for less than 10k.

So you’re the CIO. What do you do? Laugh? Polish off the resume?

Well, if you’re Russell Smith, the CIO of Estes Industries, you take a deep breath – and look to Open Source. Estes Industries, based in Wichita Falls, TX, is a distributor of crop protection chemicals, specialty chemicals, seed and fertilizer. Smith turned to Levementum LLC, an open source consulting firm, to help complete this “Mission Impossible”.

Levementum brought three enterprise class solutions to bear, SugarCRM, Compiere ERP and Talend Data Integration to implement a complete ERP, CRM and Data Integration solution, in less than 3 weeks, and at an astoundingly low cost.

Levementum selected all three of these solutions, recognizing them as best of breed Open Source Software solutions. All three software packages have come of age relative to the tried and true(…but expensive) commercial closed source solutions in the marketplace.
Compiere, a robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution was deployed to support accounting and operational needs. SugarCRM, the leading open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, was deployed to support the myriad of Sales Force Automation needs, as well to satisfy the need for Wireless access to Customers, Contacts, Orders and Inventory (using SugarWireless). Talend, a software product touted as the first provider of open source data integration software, was used to tie the systems together in a clean manner. Using add-ins and prebuilt adapters available in the Open Source community, Levementum was able to assemble, connect and deploy the solution quickly and cleanly.

The integrated pilot solution was built by Levementum using free “community editions” of all 3 software packages, but Estes intends to upgrade these to the Professional or Enterprise versions of the software packages, to take advantage of software support for these mission critical systems as they begin to roll the solution out in production.

Certainly there was a lot of excitement among Estes’ users – certainly a highlight of the project was demonstrating Order Tracking and Inventory management on an iPhone…but beneath the fun and excitement of accomplishing the critical functional goals of the program, there were a couple key takeaways, that are lessons for any CIO:

1. The Breadth of Open Source Solution offerings that are available to the public, are empowering companies to cover almost any information challenge they have. Whereas in the past all you had was Linux, today you have SugarCRM, Compiere, Talend and a host of other robust software packages that you have to choose from.
2. Open Source Solutions have “Come of Age” (like Compiere, SugarCRM and Talend). From a feature and architecture perspective, these applications have “grown up” and provide the depth of functionality, and the scalability that Medium and Large companies require.

The fact is, what cost hundreds of thousands or millions in the past, can now, with Open Source, be accomplished at a fraction of the cost. Open source solutions are the “great technology/value equalizer”. Luckily, over the past decade, these solutions have come of age – and as CIOs tackle their most challenging problems, Open Source tools are steadily proving to be far and away the most valuable tools in the arsenal.

Uncategorized compiere, crm, levementum, sugarcrm, talend, wireless

A recent article on TheStreet.com, “Salesforce Has Something to Be Thankful For” by Ivy Lessner highlights the risks and rewards available to the traditional CRM vendors given current economic conditions. While I agree with much of what the author points out, I did notice a glaring omission in her analysis. There was no mention of open source CRM, namely SugarCRM - an award-winning open source software platform.

Open source software and especially SugarCRM has the potential to come out of the current economic downturn as big winners. Currently, SugarCRM is the leading commercial open source vendor and in a down economy is in a great position to grow at rates even greater than those predicted by Lessner for salesforce.com. Like salesforce.com’s greatest strengths, SugarCRM is subscription-based and can be hosted, however it provides far greater flexibility and lower implementation costs than salesforce.com. In addition, it has more flexibility in its deployment options than salesforce.com which many medium to large-sized companies value for reasons of security, control and integration.

The down-side dynamics in today’s economic climate drive many companies to figure out how to grow sales, increase demand, and sell more effectively and most sales management teams know that CRM can be a tool to help a sales force to break out as the economy improves. This fact coupled with the cost-effectiveness of SugarCRM subscriptions and implementations make it a a very low risk approach to CRM. We will see many companies that have not previously considered open source in the past, inclined to consider it now. Commercial open source CRM software has evolved over the last several years and is now ready for the enterprise. This coupled with the current economic conditions can be the impetus that propels open source CRM into the forefront. Like Linux before it, commercial open source CRM, namely SugarCRM, is primed for the enterprise and explosive growth. Already, over 3,500 commercial customers use SugarCRM to grow their business.

At the end of this current economic downturn, we may look back and say this was a defining event for open source.

Uncategorized crm, open-source, sugarcrm

Leads Management is a part of every good CRM package and we are implementers of two such packages - Model N for the Semiconductor Industry and SugarCRM for everyone else. Over the course of implementing leads management for a few dozen companies I have had the opportunity to go back and talk to the occasional sales manager, marketing manager, or IT person responsible for implementing leads. There is a common theme amongst those who feel their implementation of leads management was successful - they don’t rely on the software. Leads management is not all about the software or the tool, like building a house is not all about a hammer. An effective and successful leads management program requires planning, execution, and evaluation. The software tools may assist in all three of these key areas, however all three also involve active and focused attention by committed individuals to be successful.

1. Lead Planning and Generation - this stage consists of planning the entire campaign, determining lists, developing messaging, selecting the medium, setting the timing, planning the marketing project. The tools help, but can’t do it all - plan and organize.

2. Execution - this stage consists of sales/marketing management and staff capturing, distributing, qualifying and nurturing leads. If this is not an actively managed function, you get marginal benefits.

3. Evaluation - this stage may be the most important. Only through active analysis and evaluation of past successes and failures can your lead management solution become increasingly successful. A business intelligence solution that drives continuous improvement in the planning and execution stages results in greater leads efficiency, improved scoring of leads and ultimately more leads converted to customers.

Levementum is a system integrator of CRM software for the enterprise and has successfully implemented leads management in many industries and companies of all sizes.

Uncategorized crm, demand-management

Today’s business environment is changing and evolving faster than ever before. It is becoming increasingly difficult to make the incremental improvements that lead to improved profitability and competitive advantage. The survival of any business in this highly competitive environment requires adopting a strategy and culture of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement can be equated to Darwin’s hypothesis of ’survival of the fittest’. Those best suited to adapt and change are most likely to survive.

Businesses have now been evolving for many years, those who have survived the long-term have done so in large part as a function of their willingness to change and adapt. We have learned from the failures and successes of those who came before us and as a consequence the changes we seek now are in terms of ‘tweaks’. We look for the small changes and corrections that lead to greater profitability, success and survival.

The key to continuous and incremental improvement is understanding the data that drives and is derived from business-as-usual, knowing the environment. Once you have a clear view of the environment, then making informed decisions and taking action can be the difference between growth and stagnation.

The keys to understanding the environment and making informed and intelligent decisions based on this understanding is commonly referred to as Business Intelligence. The path to effective Business Intelligence (BI) can be summarized as follows:

1. Establishing clear business goals, objectives and/or initiatives.
2. Identify and prioritize the metrics and measures that are linked to each goal, objective and/or initiative.
3. Map specific individuals or teams to the measures and metrics being monitored and ensure they are empowered to influence each measure.
4. Monitor the data for next actions, progress and for intended results.

The path above may be simple and understated, however it clearly and concisely outlines the keys to successful BI. It requires the participation of management and staff as well as technology to help collect, organize and present the identified measures and metrics.

Levementum has implemented BI solutions for businesses of all sizes and specializes in guiding companies through the process of implementing a successful BI strategy coupled with industry leading technology. The Business Intelligence solutions are designed to meet specific business goals and objectives through the use of technology coupled with empowered teams or individuals. The combination of Levementum’s staff expertise, structured methods, and industry visibility can help your company take ideas from inception to deployment.

Visit our website for more on Open Source Business Intelligence.

Uncategorized business-intelligence, methodology