Tag Archives: software as a service

Raise a Cup of Kindness

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As we exit another wild, unpredictable year filled with economic, political and environmental upheaval—resulting in changes wrought of inspiration, desperation and perspiration, a virtual salute.

Indeed, as a global community there is much to be lauded, much to be learned and much to be leery from 2011. Cultural revolutions from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street; regional economic fissures, that have produced a global network of fiscal fault lines; and a heaping helping of Mother Nature’s wrath have both threatened and united us. It is the same in our industry, where finance, sales and operations teams are increasingly aligning to better recognize, respond and recalibrate to these same global dynamics. We are all learning the lessons of better alignment and agility in our ability to thrive.

Like it or not, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), is our “new normal.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of one of my favorite books, The Black Swan, explores the idea that an event—positive or negative—that is deemed improbable, like the appearance of a Black Swan, can cause massive consequences.

I am inspired by what I’ve seen in 2011 from our customers, from our peers and from our Steelwedge team in approaching and resolving their own Black Swans. I’ve seen 100-year-old businesses face recession-driven loss in demand, and realign to come out tighter, stronger and better; I’ve seen consumer electronics powerhouses stare down the reality of ever-shortening product lifecycles with laser-focus on smart new product development; I’ve seen a Phoenix rise from the ashes of the automotive industry through powerful focus and improved management; I’ve seen manufacturers rebound after losing a supplier of 90% of a core part in the devastating tsunami; and I’ve seen hard choices made clearer, and sooner with better empirical data.

So, though we may not know the next Black Swan coming just around the corner in 2012, I raise a cup of kindness to what we’ve seen, what we’ve done and who we’ve met that have changed us for the better in 2011.

We too have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give us a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

 

Talking S&OP in Amsterdam

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We recently surveyed our customers to ask how they prefer to stay on top of S&OP advances and emerging best practices.  While it’s no surprise that searching the web and reading reports remain popular activities, an overwhelming majority rate industry conferences and dialogue with fellow practitioners and vendors as a “very useful” source of information.  Great content is essential but conversation remains king, particularly in a field that’s evolving as quickly as S&OP.

To that end, we’re excited that Emerson Therm O-Disc, a long-time beneficiary of the Steelwedge S&OP solution will be speaking on the topic of planning best practices.  The presentation is part of The Supply Chain Forecasting & Planning Conference (Europe), organized by the Institute of Business Forecasting and Planning and taking place on November 17 -18 in Amsterdam. The event brings together executives from leading high-tech, manufacturing and consumer products firms to discuss the fact that S&OP has risen in importance and is now a proven way to meet demand while optimizing supply chain costs.

Of course, we all know that great conversation requires that we leap outside of our comfort zone.  So, as seasoned S&OP conference goers, we’d like to share a few pointers on how to not miss out on the expertise that might be standing behind you in line at the buffet:

* Start your morning at the coffee urn. Meet people. Coffee is a sacred rite for most conference-goers – particularly when the festivities start at 7:30 AM. Be especially nice to our friends from other time zones. They’ll be the ones drinking directly from the spigot.

* Spare yourself a visit to the optometrist. Sit upfront. The fact remains that 12 point font still finds its way onto too many PowerPoint slides. We salute the truly studious who make it a point to sit within squinting distance.

* Be courageous. Ask questions. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a broadcasting degree to handle the microphone. Don’t hesitate to ask the speakers for more detail.

* Say hello to the vendors. They know a lot about S&OP too. Are you wondering how technology could enhance your S&OP process and your company’s overall performance? The nice people staffing the booths like nothing more than to talk S&OP and integrated business planning innovation. And as a bonus, they’re usually giving away cool perks.

Conference attendees will have the opportunity to explore how the Steelwedge solution provides companies with powerful capabilities to: match demand to relevant supply and capacity constraints; review all demand, inventory and supply plans simultaneously in revenue and profit as well as volume; run “what-if” scenarios to simulate the impact of changes to demand or supply; and conduct margin analysis live to evaluate the impact of these scenarios and report S&OP performance.

Hope to catch up with you by the coffee urn soon.

Click here to download the Steelwedge Solutions brochure.

 

 

 

Q&A with Roger Nessier, Vice President of Global Support and Customer Adoption

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Roger Nessier comes to Steelwedge from Symphony Services where he was a founding executive and Vice President of Products and Services.  He grew Symphony from 80 to 4000+ people over eight years and has worked with over 300 software companies to deliver outsourced development, support, services and process consulting.  At i2 Technologies where he served as the Vice President of Development, he managed 150 team members in India, Canada and US, developing and deploying order management, marketplace and content solutions.

 

Roger is passionate about sports, especially snow skiing and bicycling. He has a strong interest in learning about other cultures and is an active member in a Vietnamese Cycling Club. He takes great pleasure in accomplishing feats such as bicycling from San Jose to the top of Mt Diablo and back. He often rides as much as 70 miles in a single day on weekends. Roger and his wife have been married for 19 years and live in San Jose.

Q. Why did you choose to join Steelwedge?

A. It is important for me to feel engaged and excited about the value my company provides for our customers, but also feel that I am doing something socially and environmentally responsible.  The Steelwedge solution appears simple in its approach, but the results it achieves for our customers are game changing.  I can’t say that about many trendy software products on the market.  Steelwedge’s solution is one of the rare software solutions that is able to satisfy both the capitalist and the environmentalist in me.  Working at Steelwedge I feel I am doing great things by reducing waste and fuel costs, but at the same time improving the bottom line for our customers!

Q. What best practices does Steelwedge employ to effectively and efficiently undertake customer adoption?

A. User adoption is a top priority for me and my Steelwedge colleagues, because our business is growing by word of mouth, and high adoption translates into great customer satisfaction.  We ensure high user adoption by carefully reviewing current business processes and ensuring that leveraging Steelwedge becomes a natural amplifier and extension of current processes. We also heavily emphasize leveraging customer super user evangelists to help spread the value Steelwedge provides so users are led to Steelwedge, not forced to use it.  Lastly, we ensure that the user experience is impeccable by making sure our solutions are always available, reliable and intuitive.

Q. What new process do you hope to employ to empower the Steelwedge Solutions team?

A. Our company has doubled in size over the past year, and with that growth we need to continue to ensure we are paying attention to the needs of our employees and satisfying their career objectives, so they can continue to drive high levels of customer satisfaction. Happy employees deliver happy customers.  As a smaller company, it was easy to give employees personalized attention without much thought to the processes for doing that, but as our company grows it is necessary to ensure we have formalized reward programs.  I am working with our HR organization to ensure we have frequent and material recognition of our exemplary team members.

Q.  What immediate changes (if any) will you apply to make the Steelwedge Support process stronger and more efficient?

A. My support team members have heard me say this often:  The journey is as important as the destination.  Our team members are very good at developing extremely creative solutions to difficult problems, but are sometimes remiss in frequently communicating progress.  I believe in over communication and giving updates even when there is no update.  I also believe that our customers appreciate it when we can develop a solution with minimal overhead to our customers, i.e. we quickly ascertain the challenge, investigate an approach and come back with a solution without our customer having to spend a lot of time explaining their issue.

Q. What steps will you take under your leadership to improve collaboration between solutions, implementation, development and support teams?

A. We are instituting an engineer rotation program to ensure our engineers are exposed, educated and empathetic to the challenges of other engineering departments.  For example, we are putting engineers that typically conduct support on engineering projects and have implementation engineers work to solve tricky challenges in support.  The benefits of this program are great for Steelwedge and great for our employees that are looking for a more varied work experience vs. what you get in the siloed departments of large companies.  It’s even better for our clients, who can be sure that all of Steelwedge is working as a team to solve any problems and come up with creative solutions.

Q. What are your thoughts on the work culture at Steelwedge?

A. I am very impressed with the teamwork here at Steelwedge and the willingness of various teams from different departments to work through a challenge to ensure that challenges are overcome and resolved. I am particularly impressed with the caliber of everyone comprising the Steelwedge family. There’s a lot to learn with this organization and plenty of opportunity for interesting interaction with many intelligent people.  I joined Steelwedge at an interesting period of its growth and I am glad to take part in the next phase of growth.

 

 

 

Steelwedge Secures $16 Million Investment to Accelerate Growth

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I’m very pleased to announce that Steelwedge has reached an important milestone today in our growth as a company.  We’ve received a $16 million growth equity investment led by Mainsail Partners, accelerating our efforts to serve our rapidly expanding customer base while continuing to build breakthrough sales and operations planning (S&OP) and integrated business planning (IBP) products.

It was important to find an equity partner that could help us beyond simply providing capital.  Jason Payne and his Mainsail team have a strong track record helping “boot strapped” companies evolve into world-class companies.  They have a wealth of operational expertise working with next generation software providers and bring to bear an extensive network of technology professionals.

This investment will help us to facilitate global sales growth and ensure seamless support to our current portfolio of global customers. Our customers will have access to the leading edge technology, including an enhanced IBP platform. I’m especially pleased that Mainsail’s strategic vision complements our long-time goal of building best-in-class solutions that exceed the expectations of our customers.

Read the press release here: http://www.steelwedge.com/news/details.php?relid=109

Why is the SaaS Adoption Rate Rising in Spite of the Downturn?

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The week’s Blog entry is provided courtesy of Christian Smagg, a respected French SaaS expert. Further commentary by Christian can be found at http://www.saastream.com/my_weblog/   Christian’s experience is very simliar to the Steelwedge experience on a daily basis – demand for SaaS appliciations are rising.

As experienced in previous economic downturns, companies that invest smartly during the bad times, emerge quicker, and better equipped to grow faster after the recession. Thinking creatively about how to do more with less is the key to IT innovation during challenging times and allow companies not only to survive but also to seize the extraordinary opportunities that arise during periods of vast uncertainty. When you think about it, creative application of new technologies during weak economies actually gave rise to huge waves of productivity like Software-as-a-Service, Web 2.0 or social networking.

But fear is driving decisions at many companies these days, causing this unhealthy lock-up of budgets. Current miasma should not slow down or prevent companies from innovating and creating value so as to survive, weather the economic storm or even outperform competition.

Financial crises are often having a huge impact on IT departments, resulting in significant increases in business activity, placing greater burden on IT resources and forcing them to find new ways to boost productivity while slashing expenses. At times like these, it is highly recommended that companies seriously consider leveraging applications delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, harnessing the broader value that these solutions can play in not only moving the business forward but moving it beyond the current economic crisis as well.

Indeed, CIOs should take a much closer look at SaaS solutions as a way to avoid significant up-front investments in new software platforms by simply “renting” on-demand applications that would provide added returns where most needed: the top line. SaaS would empower IT teams to achieve and sustain efficiency and quality, while facilitating the kind of cost-effectiveness that becomes a top priority during a recession.

SaaS is providing a faster and more economical way for organizations to deploy, run and utilize softwares. This flexibility is particularly valuable during economic uncertainty for the following obvious reasons:

1. Reduced upfront costs. SaaS makes it more affordable for budget-conscious organizations to implement the new applications they need to execute effectively their “recession-proofing” plans.

2. Reduced in-house IT overheads and increased focus on strategic IT projects. SaaS is helping the business through the economic downturn by freeing IT staff from deploying and maintaining in-house solutions.

3. Continuous quality of service. Even if business activity and the demand placed on technology solutions are often increasing significantly.

4. Lower licensing and maintenance costs, reduced overall cost of ownership, also smoothed by the actual SaaS subscription model.

5. Quicker, easier and less risky deployment and upgrade to new future versions. This reduced implementation risks together with the ability to respond more nimbly to changing business needs while smoothly and incrementally adding new capabilities are making this option significantly more attractive in tougher economic times.

A major advantage of SaaS solutions is the optimum flexibility provided, enabling companies to downsize or reorganize while minimizing waste by instantly reducing or increasing the size and scope of their solution, at any time.

These benefits mean that SaaS is now being increasingly used by companies in a number of areas, not only including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation but also enterprise collaboration, web conferencing and back-office requirements such as expense management, procurement, Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Resources functions to name a few.

In tougher economic times, companies want to shed the extra costs and risks inherent in large, long-term IT implementation projects. It is therefore becoming obvious that, as companies aggressively implement cost-cutting measures, IT organizations that leverage SaaS solutions will realize tremendous cost savings, while continuing to support the business’ needs in the most flexible and effective manner.

SaaS is already an important part of mainstream IT in companies both large and small. Its basic value propositions are now widely established and accepted, including low upfront costs, simplified software management (for both maintenance and upgrades), effective security, high reliability, and increasingly, integrative capabilities to bridge data and functional gaps that exist as a result of existing systems and processes. It is therefore expected that SaaS solutions will gain significant share during and immediately following the current economic turmoil, since offering customers the ability to continue to innovate at a substantially lower absolute cost of entry and ongoing TCO, during a period of intense capital spending constraint.

For further insight on this topic, you may want to review a recent Gartner survey analysis focusing on identifying usage patterns and key trends for SaaS within the enterprise, including SaaS usage per market segments, migration activity between deployment models, projected future usage and investment for both on-premises and on-demand, and the state of governance policies within enterprises currently using or planning to use SaaS.