The epiphany
In any endeavor like this, it is always good to go back to the beginning to provide some perspective and I will attempt to do that in as brief a manner as possible J. The journey to build SBA, the BCM feature area for Outlook and POS began in early 2002 with an intense multi city; multi country research study to understand the processes and pain points of small businesses. The research was observational in nature and covered businesses from every major vertical industry from restaurants to travel agencies, from jewelry stores to financial services organization. We spent the better part of a year conducting this research and watching small businesses run their day to day operations. It soon became apparent that no matter what industry area we studied, every small business spent a considerable amount of non value added time and effort looking for information they needed, re-entering data and using several manual workarounds as they went about their day to day routine of selling, marketing and servicing their clients and filing taxes, paying employees and complying with various state and federal regulations. While each organization had a lot of good data, these were not tied together and predominantly lived in independent islands of automation and in many cases just on paper. Many businesses had put together workarounds to use this disconnected information in their day to day activities and had given up on software solving these problems.
One of my first customer visits was to a small food wholesaler in southern California. I watched the owner of this business along with the office manager pull together a marketing campaign. It began with the two of them sitting together and creating an excel spreadsheet with items they wanted to promote the next day. They started off by going through the company’s accounting system and identifying items that were in stock and which would perish in a few days. They then manually entered that data into excel to create different price points to promote the products at various volumes. The owner constantly looked at the costs and margins in the accounting system to make the final decision. He then cut and paste the excel spreadsheet into a word document where he then added more information and content on the promotion. The office manager then merged the word document with the addresses of 300 of their customers which they pulled out of outlook and then sent this information to an e-fax software. He put his own home fax number as the last number on the sheet as a check point. The next morning as the customers began to roll in and buy the products they were not able to track the specific customer to the promotion as they issued invoices and received payments. The owner was unable to track the trends, purchase history and payments of all his customers in an easy manner. Many of the reports he needed were not easy to generate and many of the decisions he was making on sales, marketing, inventory purchasing and pricing were based on gut feel and instinct. In order to promote a few products and sell them to the customers they had to traverse the accounting system, excel, word, outlook and the POS system without ever being able to use the information for any future decision making or analysis.
The essence of this observation was duplicated many times over regardless of the industry. The business we were studying would change but the underlying problems were systemic. The good news was that most of these businesses were using MS office and the ubiquity and ease of use of the productivity apps were doing the job. However accounting, marketing and sales systems were neither talking to each other or too the productivity or the communication apps. The solution suddenly loomed large in front of us. We had to step back and create solutions that allowed the small business user to access any data they wanted, when they wanted and in a manner that was easy and instinctive. The goal being to build software for the small business that mapped to the roles and processes within their organizations. Nothing like that existed in the marketplace and for that matter we were hard pressed to identify any small business application innovation for over a decade. It suddenly became a mission for us and the first technical ideas around implementing such a solution began to emerge as we stood surrounded with all the data from our customer visits and a white board with a marker.
Nearly four years later we have a full suite from BCM to SBA to POS to Payroll to Credit Card Processing !. A small business can use this new business suite just as simply and easily as any office app and they all work together. It’s that simple!. I am looking forward to my next visit to S CA and dropping by to see how my friends at the small wholesale outlet are doing with their use of Office SBE and SBA. I hope they get to go home a few minutes earlier, make decisions with a little less pain and track their business with a little more ease then they used too. As software professionals there can be nothing more gratifying……
And the work has just begun. The innovations we are working on for the next release will truly notch this up a level J
