SUCCESS STORY

Davis Controls Ltd. is one of Exact Software's most valued customers in North America. Neil Montgomery, president and CEO, was kind enough to share some thoughts with the attendees of this year's EPIC conference.

Neil is always on the lookout for new possibilities, for easier ways to get the job done, to lower costs, to raise customer satisfaction and to add value. Neil believes today’s business owners, however, want to know how software solutions, such as Macola ES and e-Synergy, will change the way they do business, as much as they want to know how it will increase profits.

Having recently been through the selection and implementation process, Neil talked about what were, for him, some important questions and highlights of the experience.

By request of the many Business Partners in attendance at EPIC, below is the text of Neil's address:

To ‘E’ or not to ‘E’ Presented
by Neil Montgomery
- March 27, 2003 at EPIC '03 Conference

Isn’t this a phenomenal day? Isn’t this the most magnificent place? Isn’t it incredible the way that superlatives are tossed around these days? How is it possible that each new development is deserving of the unparalleled distinction that invariably gets attached to it?

Aren’t we in danger of running out of fresh adjectives to describe the ‘best of breed’?

For me, and I think for other business managers of my generation who are struggling to make informed choices from a sea of technology excellence, the words are losing their punch? Everyone is promising the world, with ‘market leading’ this, and ‘superior’ that. Is it any wonder that in the face of continuous bombardment with so many ‘vital’ and ‘unsurpassed’ products, many of us are overwhelmed? No wonder we’re too confused to pull the trigger.

The sublime has become the clichéd.

And then what can we say when something really special comes along?

Something like Macola Enterprise Suite or e-Synergy from Exact Software.

Business owners like me are constantly being challenged by new ways of doing business. We spend a lot of our time trying to identify what mix of E-business strategies will strengthen our organizations. We believe that we understand the core competency of our companies and we invest considerable time and energy and resources into building relationships that put us close to customers, so that we might better understand their needs. To ensure continued growth and improve competitive advantage, executive officers are now obliged to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of ‘E-business’ propositions against the traditional business models that got us here in the first place. How can we, who don’t really understand all the technical stuff anyway, separate all the hype from the single strategic advantage that will match our resources and needs, and help us build more profitable customer relationships?

My name is Neil Montgomery; I am the President and CEO of Davis Controls Ltd., and in this role, I am happy to tell you that I am definitely neither special nor distinctive. Davis Controls Ltd. is a strong, although unremarkable Distributor of Industrial Instrumentation and Process Automation and Control devices. Founded in 1933, we are a financially solid, somewhat conservative, $15.0 Million a year, mid-market business and we employ 45 people. Our head office is located in Canada, just west of Toronto, Ontario. From here, we provide centralized support to our branch offices in Montreal, Hamilton and Calgary and to our field sales offices in Barrie, London, and Vancouver, as well as to thousands of customers, large and small, from coast to coast.

We are not a Fortune 100 Company. Bill Gates is not trying to acquire us. Jack Welch has not sent me his resume yet. In other words, in many, many respects, we probably look very much like the company that fits the profile of your target customer. We probably think, and work, and act exactly like the company that ‘Macola ES’ and ‘Business Process Management for Macola ES’ or e-Synergy, as it used to be called, were designed for.

I have been invited here today to share with you, some of the factors and expectations that led us to the decision to implement Macola ES and e-Synergy, the web-based applications that are native to ES, and to tell you about some of our experiences along the way.

Allow me to begin with what were for us, the business issues. Not only was it necessary for us to address these corporate concerns before we could launch the initiative, I believe that this phase of your sales cycle, as you market this product, will be the most challenging. During our executive review before the decision to commit, we had to answer questions like;

• “Is this implementation worth doing?” “If, so, why?”
• “Will it strengthen our bottom line?”
• “Do we need to and want to commit to it now?”
• “How will we manage it?”
• “Who will manage it?”
• “How much will it cost?” and,
• “What solution is best for us?”

Please bear with me for a few minutes while I share with you some of the ideas currently circulating about these business issues, as well as some of the conclusions that we drew. Then I can tell you about some of our specific experiences with our ‘Business Process Management for Macola Enterprise Suite’ implementation.

At Davis Controls, we define E-business as any business process that utilizes Internet technology or a web-based application. These include E-mail, websites and portals, virtual private networks and intranets. Studies in Canada have confirmed that among leading growth companies, defined as companies with between 20-500 employees and a minimum growth rate of 50% over three years, there are a significant number of early adopters of Internet technology.

I believe that the people that you are targeting now, with the integrated ES and e-Synergy solution, are the ‘Early Adopters’. These are the visionaries, the trailblazers and the growth oriented risk takers. These are the people who believe that if you stop for lunch, you are lunch! It has also been demonstrated that these same early adopters generate, on average, 10% more revenue per employee than the ‘Majority’ and the ‘Late Majority’ adopters. The ‘Majority’ adopters are still sitting on the fence, gun-shy in their state of confusion about who’s really got the ‘Killer App”, waiting for some clear answers to the seven questions I just asked. They want to know what direction to take, and what lies ahead.

Leading growth companies are the employers who repeatedly demonstrate that their attitude and management techniques are unconventional. These employers are willing to change their own role as the needs of their companies change. They have unwavering commitment to growth and will let nothing, not even themselves, stand in the way of innovation and evolution.

In order to survive - and thrive – in this digital economy, every organization must rethink its products, services, supply chains, business processes and relationships with their employees, customers and partners. Every business will eventually need to achieve a comfort level with E-business. To deny this, is the business equivalent of tossing in the towel. At Davis Controls, we believe that if we are not ready for this new reality when our customer is, then we will lose that customer. We also believe that a long-term E-business strategy is now less than 12 months. If you don’t have a culture of continuous learning and adapting and of changing your business model, then the opportunity that lies ahead is going to be missed. Competitiveness today is based on business model innovation and the exploitation of emerging technologies. Our question, and I am sure the question of many other companies like us, was this; “With so much new and ‘superlative’ technology available, which one is best for us? Which one do we invest in?” One thing is certain: a company’s E-business strategy must evolve from its core business strategy.

Here’s what’s going on in Canada;

• 60% of all leading growth firms evaluate their competitors websites
• 50% believe in creating a competitive advantage through E-business
• 42% feel they have communicated their strategy effectively to their staff
• 34% have delivered E-business training
• 32% have a separate team within the company looking at E-business issues
• 27% have performance measures tied specifically to E-business

The factors that have the greatest impact on the ‘strategic readiness’ of an organization are;

1. The degree of executive commitment to creating a competitive advantage through E-business, and
2. The development of performance measures tied to E-business objectives.

• Over 60% of leading growth firms currently track their E-Business spending separately within their IT budget
• The average leading growth firm devotes about 12% of their IT budget to E-business
• Over 80% of leading growth firms expect their spending on E-business to increase over the next two years

Not surprisingly, the majority of the E-business applications that leading growth firms already have up and running today, are currently ‘stand-alone’. That is, they are not linked or integrated with other operations systems in place, such as Customer Care Systems (i.e. Order Entry, Billing, Call Centers), Accounting Systems (i.e. A/P, A/R, Inventory), Production/Scheduling Systems and Sales/Relationship Management Systems.

This suggests to me that a significant portion of E-business spending over the next two years will be in application and process integration. This is your target market!

And so, with so many self-proclaimed market-leading solutions out there to choose from, what is the compelling case for Exact’s integrated ES/e-Synergy solution?

There is no question that we are excited about the 119 listed product enhancements delivered in Macola ES that were not present in Progression. Specific enhancements, like the 21 password protection scenarios, and the new 30-character item number and the added pushbutton functionality in Item Master and the handy calendar searches in the date fields, are all fantastic. In fact they’re ‘bitchin’. Now there’s a superlative that nobody else is using. But lets be honest. The holy grail of E-business is to be fully integrated, and in this competitive environment, sooner is better than perfect.

Most leading growth firms in Ontario are still in the process of implementing E-business initiatives upstream and downstream in their supply chains, with suppliers and customers. They have not yet however, realized the full potential of integrating the Internet into their own back-office business processes. This too, is evidence that spending on E-business initiatives will continue to increase.

In E-business execution, there are measurable opportunities for early adopters in their supply chains. These include

• Online integration with suppliers, so that a firm is able to place and track the status of an order, and
• The ability to do electronic bill presentation and payment.

A firm’s ability to view and manage its supplier as a strategic partner and not simply as a supplier of materials, will be crucial in the future.

So too is a firm’s relationship with its customers. Early adopters will benefit from allowing customers to make use of the Internet to see up through their supply chain and track their orders from purchase to payment.

And so at Davis Controls, our question became; “What is it that our customers value the most about us?” What we concluded kind of flies in the face of our conservative 70-year history. In the world of Industrial Instrumentation, our customers value reliable products, engineered application solutions and fast response. This hasn’t changed and we do all that, but so do others. Going forward, we believe that these same customers will increasingly expect a whole variety of information services about industrial control and factory automation, and they will look to us to provide it. Price and delivery are still very important factors, but our customers no longer seem to care who actually builds the instruments? And forget about product differentiation. If there are subtle product differences that we offer over the competition, they are generally not important enough for customers to pay a premium for. In our industry and even more so, I expect, in yours, imitation among competitors is widespread. Features that differentiate a firms products or service are quickly copied, thus reducing their competitive value. Organizations therefore continuously need to find new ways to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

At Davis Controls, we were in the unique and privileged position of knowing what Macola Progression had already done for us in terms of back office performance. We knew the product, the people, the level of support to expect, the strategic alliances of the parent company, the direction of product development and our cost structure to sustain the platform. We also knew the management commitment and customer centric philosophy of the folks at Exact. We bought into Macola in 1996 on the promise that we would never outgrow it, and so far, Macola, and now Exact, have delivered on that promise. From everything that I have seen, we will be able to continue to use the business tools from Exact, and the advantages that they deliver, to further differentiate ourselves in our market for years to come. The real good news for us is that this market leading power and performance is available from Exact for significantly less than an investment in Siebel or SAP for the same capability.

Our challenge is to learn to package these service capabilities and make them available to our customers and suppliers on a subscription basis. What really counts for customers is our ability to design the solution, source the solution, deliver the solution and increasingly to control and manage the customer relationship over the lifetime of his application. Contrary to the opinion of some, we think that by using web-based technology, we will become even more intimate with our customers tomorrow than we are today.

The most commonly cited benefit of building customer relationships is that they promote customer loyalty, meaning that given the choice, customers will patronize your firm. Such loyalty is often associated with a lower sales cost, on the basis that serving a repeat customer is typically thought to be less costly than attracting a new one.

However, the effort put into maintaining relationships is far from cost free. For really important customers, it is not uncommon for providers of services and products to give price breaks or special discount treatment that may cut into profit margins. So any assistance that we can get, in making and maintaining a strong relationship with a customer, is worth looking into. Isn’t e-Synergy designed to do exactly that?

The magic of the Internet is that to create the most value today, companies no longer need to have the biggest factories, or the most people, or the most money, or the fanciest offices. Smaller and smaller groups of talented people with a passionate commitment to a set of good ideas can do bigger and bigger things. The primary creators of value these days are brains and principles. Powerful ideas and high standards. Business owners in this new economy are challenged with the notion that their job, and the job of their colleagues, is not to out-hustle the competition, but to out-think them. That means generating better ideas and creating faster fixes and feedback, more efficiently than anyone else.

We are conscious that everyone in our company knows something about our most important accounts. We know this because everyone deals with these accounts. Secondly, our front office software is full of years of recorded information about these relationships. Finally, our back-office ERP software stores the commercial records of all business transactions we’ve had with these same customers and accounts over the same period.

We are in complete agreement with Exact that the integration of these front and back office resources makes perfect business sense, and we firmly believe that the integrated ES/e-Synergy platform gives us this solution. I’m sure that there was an excellent reason for the name change, but I thought that ‘electronic Synergy’ was a real appropriate name for this application.

This is the age of the customer. Customers are more demanding than they have ever been before. They have access to more information at greater speeds and with greater interactivity than ever before. They also have access to more suppliers. These suppliers are willing to do almost anything to attract their attention and to steal them away from their current suppliers. Customers don’t really care about our products; they care about their own. Customers are in control – never has there been a better time to be a customer or a more demanding time to be in customer service.

Michael Dell believes that competition will take place on the battleground of customer experience. Mr. Dell is referring to the sum total of all transactions a person has with a company’s representatives, products and processes; before, during and after the transaction.

In order to achieve this experience, companies must start by understanding the complex problems of their customers. At Davis, before we can even begin to sell a customer a product, we must try to understand what is driving that customer, what his issues are and how we can help him solve a problem. This is commonly referred to in our business as identifying and resolving the source of customer pain.

Everyone in our company, including Accounting, Service, Sales Promotion, Purchasing, Inside Sales and Field Sales, even Warehousing are talking to our customers on a daily basis. During the performance of these duties, information about people, projects, opportunities, product requirements, competition, key influencers and decision makers, corporate direction, strategic objectives, budgets, timing and other important intelligence about the account or the opportunity, and its significance to Davis Controls Ltd., is determined. This information is critical in the development of an account profile within the context of our ‘Solution Selling’ approach to Customer Relationship Management.

In the context of this EPIC event, we are your customers! Davis Controls and other Distributors and Manufacturers like us are no different than the customers that we in turn serve. As resellers of software, you too must find out what your customers need, then design that solution, deliver that solution and manage that relationship over the lifetime of the product, which, by the way, will not be outgrown. The process is the same.

In our case, comprehensive and regular input to our CRM database is a crucial component of our corporate philosophy on good Relationship Management. To drive this point home, we have made the input to and the utilization of this database a condition for participation in our Bonus and Commission incentive programs.

Consequently, we have customer information and operational data from multiple sources flowing in with ever increasing volume and speed. We have found e-Synergy, with it’s rapid search and retrieval functions, to be an effective way to assimilate and integrate this sea of customer data, from which we derive insights and advantages that make up our competitive edge. These insights include a deeper understanding of customer and partner relationships and key performance indicators. This information must be complete, instantly visible in real time and available to everyone in the entire enterprise.

On these points, please excuse me for preaching to the choir. You all know, better than I do, that e-Synergy creates an information-rich environment that facilitates and promotes more efficient work. And that knowledge management tools like e-Synergy create an e-workplace where personnel throughout the company can access valuable information from everywhere in the organization. Information that was previously unattainable. E-Synergy utilizes one database and one single transaction table where information is retained and archived for optimal organizational performance. The one-time recording of data in context, by the ‘Resource’ directly involved, links relevant data to all of the people, products, customers, workflows and financial transactions concerned. Since implementing e-Synergy, I have noticed that all Davis employees, and not just the Sales Department, are conscious that they, through their inputs, are each making a valuable contribution to our overall performance and success.

E-Synergy is a web portal that has been enriched with knowledge management and collaborative tools, including e-HRM, e-Logistics, e-CRM, e-Workflow, e-Documents, e-Project, e-Financials and expertise search technologies. We use the Internet to communicate all corporate information relating to customers, products and employees, including documents, news and correspondence. Integrated with our ERP and CRM, the HRM, SCM and document management systems coordinate information from all departments into one multi-functional browser-based database, further improving information access and exchange. This empowers everyone in the company to deliver better, more complete service and faster response. Integrating E-business applications with back office systems provides a scalable and flexible infrastructure that is less costly to manage and more seamless to use.

E-business solutions that bridge shift changes and cut across time zones, let customers access real-time information about their account aging status, back-ordered items, inventory, product pricing, open order status and payment history. The management of Davis Controls has instantaneous access to sales results by representative and by territory, current accounts payable and receivable details, cash receipts, open quotes and a host of other important management information required to make informed decisions and to respond immediately. Even suppliers are now interacting with the same data. There is no longer an excuse for the missing link.

Success is measured in efficiency and productivity. Certain other benchmarks, like planning and workflow activities, number of documents created, projects registered, orders entered by sales rep and several other physical measurements are possible, and we do them; however, the final test for enterprise-wide buy-in is always whether or not the investment has resulted in improved productivity. At Davis we make the case that the e-workplace environment and how easy we are to do business with, make up an essential piece of our value proposition. These collective capabilities help to make Davis Controls more attractive to buyers of industrial instrumentation looking for solutions to industrial problems, as well as to manufacturers of industrial instrumentation looking for a new channel, or a better channel. It seems that ‘How we do it’ has become as important as ‘What we do’.

We implemented e-Synergy in 2001 and it’s been a big success. After my opening remarks, now I’m reluctant to use superlatives. But how can I not? It’s been better than a big success. But it wasn’t an instant success and it wasn’t an easy success. E-Synergy is too big for a simple plug-n-play. E-Synergy is different than and more promising than and potentially more threatening than anything that a conservative mid-market company like Davis Controls has ever seen before. Exact’s product brochure claims that e-Synergy is conceptually different from other information systems. That’s the biggest understatement since Noah said, “it looks like rain”. Where others manage single business entities, such as Accounting, HRM, ERP, CRM, or SCM, e-Synergy covers them all. And then there’s e-Workflow.

This one is trickier than the rest. Not only does e-Synergy require total corporate buy-in in order for it to work properly, not only does it insist that all relevant information be input in order for it to fulfill it’s promise, e-Synergy and in particular, e-Workflow bares the soul of the enterprise and everyone in it, to visibility and accountability.

While business owners can’t hang on to their legacy systems for fear of offending employees, customers or suppliers, they must also assess the resilience of their company to absorb the punishment of this paradigm shift. The process of morphing from one persona to another must be managed. Managers must be totally committed to a fundamental change to their business model and they must be prepared to champion this new concept to everyone in the company. You also have to be prepared to separate yourself from the people who are not going to be successful in the new model, either because they don’t posses the right skill set or the right attitude.

Here is a short summary of what we’ve done at Davis so far.

In addition to the traditional product information portal of our website, which is wide open to the World Wide Web, we have three other portals: one for our employees, one for our customers and one for our suppliers.

The first one we put up was the Employee portal. The HRM component was easy to launch, and we took advantage of our company Christmas party two years ago to set up a digital camera station and take the pictures that we posted to our ‘Resource’ files on line. As a result, our resource photos paint some of our people in a much better light than I often see them, and I’m happy to report that most of them clean up real nice. We got to all of them before the bar opened too, and that was a stroke of genius. Human Resources then loaded up these files with all the relevant personal data, reporting hierarchies, roles and security levels, employment and training records, kids birthdays, and one competency wheel from everyone’s last performance review.

Once this was up and running, we were ready to begin firing off ‘Tasks’ and ‘Checked Tasks’. As you know, this is e-Synergy’s electronic format for communication, and in retrospect, probably the single biggest hurdle that we faced with the HRM module. We’ve been implementing new and different applications for years now, and we know that winning employee buy-in is usually what makes or breaks any implementation. Getting unanimous buy-in to ‘Workflow’ as our default internal communications vehicle was more difficult than I had expected. Apparently the open architecture of the e-workplace threatens the isolation of some who would prefer to work in isolation. Or maybe the new functionality and access to enterprise-wide information overwhelms some paper-based employees. In any case, it has always been clear to us that if we implement any application with less than 100 percent employee buy-in, it will threaten the success of the new system. It would be an even bigger frustration for us, if, at the end of the day we concluded that the software did what it promised to do, but that our users failed to use it effectively.

Microsoft Outlook is well deserving of its dominant position as the standard for information management. It stands to reason that the introduction of any new alternative will be received with resistance and doubt. We know from experience that it can take a long time to make an e-Workflow convert out of someone who rejects the idea in principle. And in the end, Outlook isn’t going away.

Outlook is however, typically a one-to-one dialogue where information that is potentially important to all, is shared among a few. An e-Workflow task on the other hand, adds to an ever growing and searchable resource pool of experience, knowledge and discussion that can be accessed by everyone in the organization. Now that e-Synergy offers the MS-Outlook e-mail add-in, the disconnect between Outlook and e-Workflow has been overcome, and buy-in has improved significantly. E-Synergy brings together the ubiquity of Outlook and the functionality of e-Workflow. Thank You Exact. This was a really nice product enhancement.

We also make extensive use of the HRM Planning calendars in e-Synergy, and now with the bi-directional synchronization between the Outlook calendar and the e-Synergy calendar, one more area of single entry, dual-visibility has been addressed. In this case, the e-Synergy calendar has much more functionality for us than the Outlook calendar has, so we use Synergy as our data entry point, and let the system backfill Outlook. In Synergy, you have the option of color coding and classifying the appointment by type, and this feature offers more than a cosmetic benefit. On the other hand, if you backfill e-Synergy by using Outlook as the front end, everything comes in as a ‘personal activity’, losing some of its usefulness in the e-Synergy context.

For performance reviews, the e-Synergy ‘Competency’ wheels are especially helpful. Since they are customizable, we set ours up to reflect our old paper based performance appraisal criteria. We also use the HRM-News page extensively and our staff has become quite creative when it comes to announcing things of interest to their co-workers. The animated attachments on the front page of HRM-News have become a new art form at Davis, and everyone is taking full advantage of the chance to publish on-line.

The next component of e-Synergy that we put into service was e-Documents. We have over 400 individual pieces of commercial literature and technical collateral to support the product lines that we represent. All of this material has been scanned into an e-Documents library, and is available to our sales reps to distribute as attachments to quotes or in response to customer inquiries. We currently have 918 active documents on the system.

The decision to adopt e-CRM took a little more time and a little more thought. In 1998 we adopted Sales Logix as our CRM of choice, and at the time, the selection was obvious. With integration to the back office, Sales Logix provided the features and functionality that suited us to a T. The ‘Opportunities’ module is especially important to the management and tracking of our territorial sales budgets. We are still running Sales Logix, and currently manage 18,470 Contacts and 10,714 Accounts in the database. Three concerns however, have prevented us from making a wholesale conversion to e-CRM:

1. We have 10 field sales reps who frequently work in remote territories, and who prefer to carry a copy of their CRM database on their laptop and work off-line until they have the chance to do a high-speed sync. As far as I know, e-CRM does not support remote syncs.
2. The Solution Selling format that we have adopted as our sales strategy is based on the traditional model of a Sales funnel, where an opportunity is driven through the six or seven stages of the sales cycle to a close. This model has not been built into the e-CRM template, and for the time being we have elected to continue using the funnel or pipeline model.
3. We do not have access yet to a convenient utility that will migrate our Sales Logix data and notes/history into e-CRM. We have about 5 years of relationship history in this database; so naturally, we don’t want to lose any of it.

Having said this, we do understand the importance and power of the ES – e-Synergy integration, and we were determined to find a way to use the advantages of the fully integrated e-CRM to our benefit.

Our sales bonus plan this year is tied to growth, and is closely associated with a strategy to significantly grow the business that we do with 40 Key Accounts in each territory. We were anxious to observe and measure the fully integrated affect of the back office ES and the front-office e-Synergy on these accounts, and so we have moved these high profile target accounts, about 600 in total, over to e-CRM. These accounts, partly by virtue of their unique designation, will receive extra special care and attention from the entire organization, and we will be able to gauge the development of these customers separately from our Sales Logix accounts. Time will tell, however, because the sales force has already singled these accounts out for targeted growth, I expect the results to be extremely positive.

Finally, before I leave our ‘Employee’ portal, I want to compliment Exact on the ‘Resource’ page, which is loaded with useful information and collaborative tools. In addition to providing a quick reference to who’s on line and how long they’ve been on, who’s in and who’s out of the office or where they are scheduled to be, according to their planner. In addition to a quick “Request’ link or e-mail link to a co-worker or access to a co-workers workflow, and lots of other useful links, the ‘Resource’ page, to me, most completely showcases the integrated power of e-Synergy.

The third portal on our website is the Customer portal. Improving the access and interaction between Davis Controls and our customers was a primary driver in making the decision to deploy a front office solution. We currently have about 200 customers registered to access their account in our back office ERP software. Some of you folks here today may have even had a tour of our site, since I have conducted several demo tours for your customers here in the United States. In truth, we are not generating very much direct business through the Web.Orders function of this site, although in time, I expect we will.

Our ‘Customer’ portal and the information it makes available to more than 200 customers from coast to coast, is much more than just a web-gimmick. It is in fact an integral component of our value proposition. Our ‘Customer’ portal provides value, and that’s not just my spin on it. Customer feedback on this feature is uncommonly positive. Our strategy is to employ sophisticated technology tools that deliver high-tech solutions to customers who are more interested in getting questions answered and solving problems than they are in understanding how that solution just got delivered. Once again the complete and friendly presentation of the e-Synergy solution is a credit to Exact.

The fourth portal on our website is for Suppliers, or Partners as we optimistically refer to them. This portal has, to my surprise, been the most difficult for us to get launched. I alluded earlier to the Achilles’ heel of new technology, known as ‘Buy-in’. One of the loudest and most chronic complaints that I hear coming from suppliers is the lack of communication from their distributors. Oddly enough, I hear this same complaint from distributors about their suppliers. Failure to provide written feedback on leads generated by very expensive media advertising campaigns is just one example of the communication gap. Clearly, distributors desire leads. They are gold in a good distributors hand. Just as clearly, the supplier of the leads wants feedback. After all, he paid for the lead. We have created a Partners portal through which we invite our suppliers to push the lead. We offer to open up visibility for them into the accounts for which leads are sent, and encourage them to follow along as we pursue the lead, identify the potential, and develop the account. All sales visits, notes, quotes, contacts, budgets, correspondence and activities are there for the viewing. It seems like the perfect collaboration platform, right?

WRONG !! You would think that we were asking for a kidney donation.

It seems that it’s a question of Control. The information is fine, provided that it is stored on their server, but not on ours. ‘Not Invented Here’ is usually the brilliant defense. Yet, in spite of all the power they posses with their expensive JBOPS software, it seems that none of them is in a position to offer similar functionality. With some of them, it doesn’t matter that we have the technology and that we are anxious to share it for our common good. No doubt there is a concern on their side that taken to an extreme, suppliers could find themselves interacting with multiple Distributors over multiple protocols.

Paranoia however, is not the exclusive domain of manufacturers. Distributors too are all too often guilty of keeping information about their customers and contacts very close to their vest. This behavior is not only counterproductive; it is contradictory to a good working relationship, where openness and candor are essential in maximizing the profitability of the relationship.

The most fruitful Supplier – Distributor relationships are based on some very basic ingredients, including a precise fit with each other, common objectives, mutual respect, complete openness in communication and a clear understanding of the quid pro quos necessary for mutual success. So, if I were to presume to offer you any advice here today, it would be that once you have a manufacturer for a customer, go after his Distribution channel. In this scenario, you would be offering the ultimate collaborative solution, you will already have an anxious and credible reference site, and you will be helping both parties create a stronger, more profitable relationship. And so finally, I think we’ve finally come to what, for us, is the secret of working successfully with e-synergy. E-Synergy assumes, NO, let me re-phrase that, e-Synergy demands an open environment. E-Synergy is all about tearing down departmental walls and sharing experiences. E-Synergy cannot work in an atmosphere of exclusion or secrecy or isolation.

Everyone, from the Chairman of the Board to the part time summer student must believe that cooperation and trust are the cornerstones of success. Whatever application software is successful in initiating, delivering and supporting complete and open communication in your organization, is the “Killer App”.

I suggest to you, that in the integrated product of Macola ES and e-Synergy from Exact Software, you have such a product.

Thank You.