Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 8:10AM Last week I had the privilege of participating in a SaaS round-table for Proformative, a Silicon Valley Corporate Finance think tank. We had a great discussion on SaaS and corporate IT governance. I presented the following SaaS 101 presentation.
- Aric Bandy
Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 11:02AM Two years ago we stepped in as our client’s IT department and committed to providing end user support. At the time, our client had 101 locations and around 360 employees all over the Midwest. We mapped out the vendor responsibilities working directly with each vendor. Using this map we implemented a triage system between our client, their vendors, and us. We enabled our client’s employees, whether working in the store or in corporate, to simply contact when problems emerge. For example, if our client had a problem with NetSuite, an ERP/CRM cloud application, he/she would call and send a ticket to us. We would open a ticket with NetSuite support. This triage system allows us to figure out exactly what the problem is within a short period of time and open the ticket with the right entity because we know all the interrelationships between the vendors and the infrastructure. The main advantage of our Managed Services offing is more holistic view of what is happening with IT operations, thereby allowing problems solved in a timely manner. Another benefit is that by having us work with IT departments of our client’s vendors, problems can be solved quicker allowing the IT team to focus on revenue generating strategic initiatives.
One example of how our services improve our client’s business is by managing their Point of Sale (POS) system. Considering that this particular client is a retailer, it is of essential to be able to process sales transactions timely and accurately. At the time we started working with our client, their POS system was around ten years old, and had outdated architecture. We realized that the databases on each location were growing too large and failing. Typically what would have happened in the past is that their IT staff would just keep fixing the problems in a reactive way, a short-term solution that does not address the root cause of the problems. During times when transaction would fail, credit card transactions had to be written on a piece of paper and processed manually. Once the transaction system recovered, the stores would call in to process the transaction, sometimes much later after the transaction had actually occurred. This problem was compounded by the fact that 75 percent of the stores were having frequent outages. Their POS was off once, twice, and sometimes even three times a month for up to a day, and sometimes even more than once a day. When our team stepped in, we continued to perform the same patches and fixes, but we also started looking into a more long-term solution because these failures were not acceptable for the success of our clients business. We sat down and looked at some low cost simple solutions that we could implement to help solve these problems. Within three weeks, we had solved nearly all of the transaction problems by revamping their data warehousing process. There is still an occasional issue here and there which is to be expected in a complex environment, but outages decreased from 75 percent of stores once to three times a month to maybe one to two stores a quarter. It has drastically improved their operations and their ability to conduct business.
Monday, June 7, 2010 at 12:40PM Monday, June 7, 2010 at 12:38PM
Monday, June 7, 2010 at 12:36PM Our Managed Services provides powerful, flexible technology that supports our client's business specific IT needs and budgets. For one of our clients, our team acts as an outsourced IT department, managing their technology without choking their budget.
Our client has a high transaction volume business, and having the transaction system down will cause significant business interruption. Before we stepped in, our client's employees who are located throughout the United States, would reach out to their own IT support contact. This contact was pretty much anybody who could fix the problem. This method of support was wasting valuable employee time. When we stepped in, we set up a triage system between our client's employees, their vendors, and our team. When a problem emerges, our client's employees can call in our support team who opens a ticket, and directs it to the appropriate vendor to make sure the problem gets resolved quickly. In this way, our client is able to continue to run their operations without business disruption. For example, a store might have a generalized credit card transaction problem. There are a lot of dependencies with the transaction system for it to work properly. The problem might be that the Point of Sale (POS) application is not working properly, the computer itself, the software on the computer, a hardware issue, the Firewall, or the Internet connection itself. Someone who manages the store would not actually be able to identify the problem without investing a lot of time. When an issue occurs, what they know is that system is down and as a result, they are unable to continue their operation. By calling into call center to do vendor triage, we take the burden off of the store manager so he or she is able to focus on operations rather than trying to diagnose and resolve these system problems.
Monday, June 7, 2010 at 12:32PM Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 10:31PM
Our client reached out to us to help lay out the risks that existed across their core line of business applications infrastructure. Initially we did an overall infrastructure assessment and evaluated their IT operations. Our findings returned a pretty low score due to numerous challenges our client was facing such as aging equipment, reactive maintenance of technology systems, and a limited IT budget. In addition, one of the challenges our client was facing was its culture where a sense of technology ownership was impeding change. Overall, our client had to put a lot of effort in order to keep everything running. Our goal was to implement systems that would allow operations and employees as a whole to work more efficiently through simplifying IT operations.
Agosto’s Solution
Our team created and facilitated an IT Steering Committee where we discussed our client’s risks. We formed executive leadership team that had to understand the process and that had success criteria and results mapped out in advance so that we could understand what expectations are. This allowed us to create a IT Strategy Roadmap which mapped out all of areas of risk and determined over a period of time what would have to be done in order to mature the environment. This commitee also addressed our client’s needs as the evolved and how we would systematically prioritize and execute on projects, with the goal of maturing the environment in a cost effective way. Software cost-cutting suggestions that our Strategic Services team recommended reduced the total IT budget from 0.7 percent of revenue in 2007 to 0.3 percent in 2009. Not only we cut the costs of our client, but we helped develop and implement a plan to leverage SaaS on many fronts and in this way overcame multiple challenges they were facing. Some of the end results are updating ten year old IT infrastructure to current technologies, implementing GoogleApps that replaced outdated e-mail and servers, replacing old Peachtree accounting software and $180,000-a-year CRM software with Netsuite, and setting up Web-based payroll system from ADP. We did last evaluation of our client’s business about eight months ago and it showed that everything that has been an issue is now updated, changed, and rebuilt so their risks level is substantially reduced.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 10:15AM Outsourcing IT is beneficial for a company in many ways, I'll highlight two of them. First of all, the cost of outsourcing the IT is usually about the third of what it would cost internally; and second, by outsourcing IT, a business reduces the risk by getting a support from experienced and efficient team who's combined knowledge would be expensive and time consuming to duplicate. Therefore, having us constantly monitor your systems, making sure they are always up and running, and fully-compliant are some of numerous advantages our team can provide for your business.
For one of our clients we implemented a Backup and Disaster Recovery platform during our managed services engagement. One evening one of our client’s core infrastructure servers had hardware failure and the server could not be brought back up. This critical problem was immediately routed to us for investigation. It happened late in the evening when most of client employees already went home and were not even aware of a problem that emerged. Our team managed to turn up the virtual version of that server on our Backup Device. Next morning when users came back to work they did not know that there was any issue and our client’s business was unaffected. Had that not been the case the business across five different states would have had experienced 24 to 48 hours of downtime. This issue could have cost the company more than several hundreds of thousands dollars a day, because it would be impossible to continue with their operations. By providing a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan, not only did we prevent a loss of productivity from happening, but we also made sure that our client’s customers were not affected. Our support team helped this company solve their issue quickly and without business interruption.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 10:11AM Our client faced the problem of currently not having a customer support system and their Peachtree Accounting Software interconnected and talking to each other. A solution to this problem was to leverage SaaS so access to this data would be easy from anywhere. As a result, our client found Netsuite, an CRM/ERP application in the cloud. Netsuite reached out to us for our implementation expertise, this is how we connected with this client. Once we engaged with the customer, we realized the importance of taking time to understand our customer’s business needs and processes first. We interviewed their management team to understand the ways they serve their customers. This enabled us to design a implementation strategy for improving our client’s business.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 10:02AM Client Overview
Our client is a franchise organization that has maintained its commitment to product quality even with spectacular growth. This commitment to their product has enabled the company to expand to over 100 locations all over the U.S. Our client provides to its franchisees a large support staff in the areas of finance, marketing, business consulting, training and product development. Communication among franchisees is one of the key factors to our client success.
Business Challenges
One of the challenges our client faced was a lack of visibility to into sales across it's network of franchisees. Gathering this information was a time intensive process and not in real time. Having visibility in real-time gives them a better grasp on the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. Another challenge our client faced was the lack of vendor responsiveness on issues related to their current point of sale (POS) system. Many support request were going unanswered or unresolved. It was time for a change.
Agosto’s Solution
Our goal was to help our client make the best decision possible and work within the budget that they had allocated. Upgrading the point-of-sale (POS) system so headquarters would have visibility into the franchise network will lay the foundation for further growth. Having an enterprise POS system not only allows for better information flow between corp. and franchisees, but it will provide a more stable, standardized, and centralized environment. This upgrade will also allow for timely and accurate sales tracking where our client can easily identify inventory levels and buyer behavior in real time. For example, our client's requirements were to be able to see if an increase in sales of certain new product has been affected by a marketing campaign. Using this new system our client is able to connect marketing dollars spend with the actual sales.
To overcome our client’s challenges with their current system our team created Request for Proposal (RFP) which was then submitted to fifteen POS vendors. The evaluation of the vendors was based on four criteria: affordability, our client’s requirements, loyalty and gift card integration, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. Currently, we are choosing between two potential vendors.
In order to help our client make a good decision, we implemented a feature analysis platform. We brought our SaaS expertise to the table and implemented a Quality assurance tool called Run Test Run that lives in the cloud. This is a quality assurance testing tool which enabled individual employees to test their respective departments, i.e. marketing can test marketing features, operations can test operations features, etc.
At this point we will be completing our testing and moving into the deployment phase. More on this later.