TheAgileStartup

b2b2dot0 Initiates Office Relief's Magento Paymetric SAP Integrated B2B and B2C eCommerce Website Initiative

It's been almost two weeks since I facilitated our Project Initiation Workshop at the Oakland, CA HQ of Office Relief.  It was an intense and exhilarating two days where we demonstrated a live B2B eCommerce website integrated to their SAP QA system.  We "threatened" to put the website into production the following Monday and asked the simple question of "why can't we?".  (This is how our standard Agile Implementation Methodology, that I've written about over the years, works.)

Using the "F" Word in Business

I had the honor of presenting to a group of budding entrepreneurs this past week at a local (Raleigh, NC) Council for Entrepreneurial Development Fastrak course.  I spoke on Market Analysis and followed an NC State Graduate School Instructor who presented an overview of Market Research.  He ended his 60 minute lecture by introducing me as the person who would explain "what to do with all of the Market Research that everyone in the room was now equipped to gather". 

Feeling the pressure, I stood up in front of the room, scanned the crowd, took a deep breath and started my presentation with... the "F" word.  

Agile Software Implementation Contracts

Today's post was originally created in response to a question posed in an Agile Business Yahoo Group that I belong to.  The question had to do with the relationship between software providers (like b2b2dot0 and SAP) and their customers during projects.  It garnered enough interest in the Agile community that I thought I'd make it available to the readers of this blog...so here it is. 

Agility in Action - Supporting an SAP Distribution Center Relocation in Real Time

One of our clients innocently sends us an email on Tuesday, April 27th asking us to close up one of their microsites in 3 days...for 3 days...in support of relocating one of their distribution centers.  The request was a simple one, "deactivate all of our French users, and only our French users, for the specified time period, so that we can make the physical and logical changes to our distribution model." 

Are Corporate eBusiness Managers a Dying Breed?

Back in the day, when the Internet and eCommerce first came on the scene in the late 90's, corporate eBusiness Managers were springing up left and right.  They were the ones charged with defining and executing their corporation's eCommerce strategies, which for the most part, was in defense of the well funded dot com threats in their individual markets. 

CentralDesktop Features the b2b2dot0 Story

Combine a great idea with bright, passionate and motivated people, a little bit of money, and empower them with Agile processes and tools and magic can happen.  It's that simple...and it's that hard.  I can honestly say that one of the keys to our success of the past two years has been the way we've embraced our collaboration tool, CentralDesktop.  So when CentralDesktop approached me to have a case study written about us, I jumped at the chance.  Partly because I wanted to let them know how important they were to us, and partly because I'm always looking for free publicity :-).

b2b2dot0 Goes to Budapest

b2b2dot0's Executive Management team just concluded our second annual Management Retreat.  We rented an apartment in Budapest for a week in order to celebrate our accomplishments, get a bunch of things done, and lay the groundwork for the upcoming year and beyond.  Today's blog post will share the highlights of our week together.

One Year of SAP Integrated B2B eCommerce Transactions

Wow!  It's been just over a year since the first production order was transmitted through b2b2dot0's service and posted into Nordson/EFD's SAP system in real time.  Time certainly flies when you're not only busy, but thoroughly enjoying what you're doing! 

Today I'll reflect a little on what we've accomplished and learned over the past year.

b2b2dot0's Email Service - Conclusion

New Product Development is a messy business.  The textbooks all make it sound like its a nice orderly linear progression from "concept to cash".  Maybe it appears to be linear in hindsight, but on a day to day basis it's anything but.

To Email or Not to Email, That is the Question.

It always starts out innocently enough. 

Something irritates one of our clients and they give us grief about it.  Internally, we complain that they complain and then we lament over the fact that they don't appreciate all of the great things that we do do for them.  We close our lament sessions with the same question: Why do they always have to focus on the negative???

Gemba in the Virtual World

Gemba is a Japanese term that means "the actual place" or "the real place".  Gemba is very familiar to Lean Practitioners as the tool to use when you want to study how a real user is engaged in an activity and uncover where the opportunities are for adding value, or removing waste, from his/her job. 

Just go to where they work and watch what they do.

Bank Failures Hit b2b2dot0

I received a surrealistic email last week from the President of Advanta, b2b2dot0's Corporate credit card provider.  He basically said his bank was going out of business in FOUR days and he was sorry for any inconvenience this would cause our company!

"Get Ramen Profitable"

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist and eCommerce pioneer, recently posted 13 pointers for aspiring entrepreneurs on his website.  While all 13 pointers make perfect sense to me, and I'm sure Paul would be happy to know that we at b2b2dot0 are intuitive followers of his wisdom, the "Get Ramen Profitable" pointer really hit home with me.

A Real Project in Real Time - Week 2

Our last installment of "A Real Project in Real Time" had me en route to facilitating our first Focus Group for Blount's SAP Integrated US Distributor eCommerce website implementation in Portland Oregon.  (For more on b2b2dot0's use of Focus Groups in general, please visit this previous blog post).  That event was held on April 6th.  On April 13th we reviewed, and got closure on, the outstanding change requests with the Blount project team.  Today's post is about what happened in between and where we go from here.

A Real Project in Real Time

Many of my inspirations are formed during my mind's journey into the depths of a much needed sleep.  Fortunately (for me and those around me), my internal censors don't allow most of them to make the return trip to my conscious state.  Today's post is a survivor born on a 7:10AM flight en route to Portland Oregon.

Why We Love Customer Focus Groups

A couple of  weeks ago, we staged our second Customer Focus Group on our soon to be released eInvoice capability for SAP.  I've been thinking about it ever since and wanted to share with you what that event looked like from my eyes.

"If We are Going to Open Our Kimono...

...we had better look good!" proclaimed Tomo Razmilovic, the President of Symbol Technologies in late 1999, as he challenged his management team to expose their SAP system to their customers over the web.

An hour a day keeps entropy at bay.

Keeping a company focused is quite challenging, especially a dynamic one like ours.  There are an infinite number of things to be done and, by definition, never enough time to get them done in. 

Software-as-a-Service is unAmerican

Well...the actual title of the ComputerWorld blog posting by Mark Everett Hall is "How SaaS hurts a fragile IT economy" but there is no doubt that Mark is labeling me as a traitor.  I'm one of a growing number of industry executives who are killing our IT economy...so he suggests.

The Quarter of the Catalog

While we're constantly working on improving our service, we like to have at least one major theme to focus on per quarter.  The fourth quarter of 2008 was designated the "Catalog Quarter".

Walk in your customer's shoes

I don’t believe any organization consciously sets out to abuse their customers.  But it amazes me how easy it is to do so when organizations are internally focused.

Creating pull - first communications with an SAP system

LeanAgile practitioners know "creating pull" as the way to connect with your clients.  It stands to reason that if real clients are “pulling” you into the market than you've got to be honing in on the real value chain.  And of course, ultimately, that's the difference between success and failure.

Waste Management sues SAP over ERP implementation

IDG News Service 3/27/08

“Waste Management said it is seeking recovery of more than US$100 million in project expenses, as well as "the savings and benefits that the SAP software was promised to deliver to Waste Management."”

Mass Customization

Mass customization is defined as "producing goods and services to meet individual customer's needs with near mass production efficiency". 

Henry Ford popularized mass production in the early 1900’s in part by adhering to his mantra of “you can have any color Model T you want…as long as it’s black”. On the other end of the spectrum is Burger King 1970’s invitation to “have it your way”, which enticed customers to design their own personal hamburger creations.

Nowadays, this is a topic that we at b2b2dot0 are constantly wrestling with. How do you strike the balance between building (and more importantly, supporting) “bespoke” products for individual customers, versus building a product architected for the “market” but tailor-able for every company’s unique situation? 

Balance is the key word here. 

Because software is so pliable, it’s tempting to architect the infinitely configurable application which would make our product available to the widest audience possible. But there are many trade offs.

 
“Designing” versus “delivering” value – First of all, no one is paying us to design and build our product. They will, however, pay us to use our service. That means that the sooner our product comes to market, the sooner everyone will be deriving real business value.

In essence, we have to anticipate the important things that could be unique across our future customer base, but only focus our energies on handling the real challenges uncovered by the customers we’re currently working with. 

Agility means architecting our product to enable us to intelligently extend it in later releases. 

Build to demand not to forecast – HAHT made a strategic blunder in 2001. We decided to diversify and expand our addressable market opportunity by extending our application to integrate with JD Edwards. Early focus groups foreshadowed a difficult journey into this new market segment. Nevertheless we proceeded. We eventually did win one client, but we consumed an inordinate amount of resources in the process. 

We planned for the masses but customized for a single client. Not exactly the “mass customization” concept we were hoping for.

The moral of this story was build to a real demand as opposed to a hallucinated (but exciting) forecast. Or in lean terms…create “pull”.

Too many choices, so little time – Over the past seven years, I have made a lot of money consulting to software companies who wanted to compress their implementation cycles. Without giving away too many of my trade secrets, I always played two cards in each of those engagements:

1. Rely less on documentation and more on demonstrations

2. Give clients less choices, not more

It wasn’t hard to cut implementation times by 50% just by introducing those two concepts.

While our application might be architected to handle the customization requirements of the masses, it’s in no one’s best interest to sift through all of those choices during the implementation process. 

We’ll have to keep that in mind.

Lean Principles – Customer value

b2b2dot0 embraces the five major imperatives of the Lean methodology:

1. Define customer value - Define not only what our customers value, but what their customers value as well.

2. Create pull – Establish a demand for our value as soon as possible.  B2b2dot0 will always strive to be “fulfilling a demand” as opposed to “pushing product”.

3. Identify the value stream – Work backwards from the day the customer is receiving value from our service and highlight the specific activities and features that contribute to that value. We want to do more of those.  The flip side is to highlight those that aren't (waste)...see step 5.

4. Setup continuous flow – Strive to shorten the time from identifying a customer's value to delivering it to them. Things that prevent us from delivering value instantly are probably sources of waste in our process...see step 5.

5. Seek perfection/eliminate waste – Anything that gets in the way of delivering value to our customers is deemed waste. We're constantly in pursuit of identifying, prioritizing and removing these obstacles.

Defining customer value has been fairly easy for us.  We've been engaged in this business area since 1999. Over the years we've learned that there are three immutable sources of value for our customers and one that is highly variable.

Immutable value #1 – Leverage their investment in SAP... which means tight integration.  That's where all the business data and logic exists.  Our customers have invested heavily in making sure that they have a single place to go to to understand which products they sell, who can buy them and for how much, if they are available, how and where they are shipped to, if they've been paid for, etc.  They don't want to spend the energy managing that information in multiple places and, even worse, risk the loss of its integrity.

Immutable value #2 – Enhance customer service... which means bringing SAP to the web so that our customer's customers become more self-sufficient.  There is no sense for an end-customer to send faxes, emails or make phone calls to customer service if they can navigate 24x7 to a web site that can satisfy their needs.  Of course a derived value of this self service capability is to reduce the burden on the customer support organization.

Immutable value #3 – A restful night's sleep...which means reliable, easy to use technology and knowledgeable and responsive support.  This not only pertains to daily operations but to responding to the evolving needs of our clients. 

Variable value – These vary by industry, customer and role. 

The building material customers only seem to want to put invoices on the web.  They say that no one wants to buy rocks over the web but that web invoices reduce days outstanding on accounts receivable enough to pay for the website. 

Other clients are using the web to add additional value to their tier 1 EDI customers by offering transactions and data that aren't easily covered by EDI.  For instance, supporting the quotation process, inquiring about availability, and retrieving additional documentation like Material Safety Data Sheets or Product Brochures. 

The majority of clients use the website to support their tier 3 customers and no longer permit orders via fax, email or  phone.  This allows their customer service organization to focus their efforts on their more strategic customers.