The real challenge of technology companies

The real challenge of technlogy companies is not their lousy products, unsufficient marketing efforts of underperforming salespeople. All three individually are not worse than in other sectors. The problem is the lack of ALIGNMENT between those three – product development, marketing and sales. And successfully ‘crossing the chasm’ is exactly about aligning those three.

To put it simply: the technical guys are not developing the products that customers are really asking for; the marketing department is failing to communicate the real value the existing solutions, and salespeople are are making promises about solutions the company doesn’t have. 

So the only way to be successful as a technology company, is not to let development, marketing and sales make their plans on their own islands, but align their efforts in the first place.

ERP: born in 1300 and still not adult

This picture shows you the church of ERP. As opposed to what some think, ERP is not new: it’s a village in Holland that was born around 1300.

This, and many other things, I learned at a Microsoft’s seminar for software companies and ISV’s on December 10th in Brussels. ERP guru Guus Krabbenborg from Terdege entertained the audience with an overview of recent (not like the village) ERP trends, both from the perspective of software companies and from endcustomers.

It appeared to me that Microsoft’s platfrom message, which Guus brought with enthousiasm,  is generally accepted by almost everyone, both the audience present and the ISV market in general. I think any software company that now or recently started building their own accounting, ERP or CRM solution from scratch, might have to reconsider if they really took the right decision. And most ISV’s who have been active on the markt since  many years with their own ERP of CRM solution, are now at least considering to migrate their solution to a standard platform like SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics. It not only guarantees the continuity of their solution, but also allows to focus on their real added value and not on building horizontal functionalities, as indicated Guus still-working on-his-website Krabbenborg.

The most interesting part of the seminar was probably the interactive discussion at the end of the presentation. Microsoft (unsurprisingly) is opposed to custom-made software solutions. Guus Krabbnborg stated that ERP customers should analyze and adapt their processes when implementing a new ERP solution, in order to keep the final solution as standard as possible. The result is that an ERP project is not an IT project, we all concluded, but an organizational and change management process in the first place.

Which raised the remark in the audience that companies – especially SMB’s- are not ready to pay for ‘change management’ or ‘consultancy’. They are ready to pay for results tomorrow from the investment they make today. This is the exact reason why consultancy firms are now suffering more than others from the crisis, said someone in the audience.

There is evidently a mismatch between what implementors of business software are promising and what endcustomers are expecting from their new solution. The ones are promising too much, and the others are expecting too much. Software implementators should say ‘no’ to their potential customers more often. Just as a car dealer should not sell a Porsche 911 Turbo to someone who always drove a Skoda before: he requires that he takes driving courses first.

Endcustomers, on the other hand, should lower their expectations and understand that an ERP project is not unlike building a new company building: it takes 2 years before it’s finished. Managers should reconsider their value scale about investing. There is something not logical about a CEO buying a € 50,000 BMW every 4 years  for him alone, while he hesitates to invest he same amount in an ERP project that can benefit the whole company – including change management.

CreaChain wins Supply Chain Award 2009 with Hegge NV

On  November 26^th, the official ceremony for the Supply Chain Awards 2009 took place in  Metropolis in Antwerpen.  Lemarco’s customer and member of ShareTEC Group CreaChain was awarded with the first place in the category “SME” for their Microsoft Dynamics NAV project at Hegge NV. Congratulations to François Loyens, Marc Hegge and their team!

Project management the weakest link in ERP

Any chain is as strong as the weakest link, and an ERP or CRM project is unfortunately a long chain with many links. As at Lemarco we’re doing a lot of interviews of customers having implemented a new business solution, there’s one remark that comes back again and again when we ask one of our last questions: “Which lessons do you take with you from this ERP/CRM implementation?”.

People almost always tend to say that they had underestimated the project management competencies of their IT-partner. Most IT-partners, even the larger ones, seem to consider project management as a secundary side-activity. Very often the so-called project manager in charge is a (senior) developer whose real heart goes to software development, not to professtional project management. This is about the same as having an architect building the house himself and then controlling the quality of the work.

To compensate for this weakness of their IT-partner, some end customers even assign a project manager from their own organization in order not to let the project go totally out of control.

Belgian Dynamics Community: new web site

The Belgian Dynamics Community is one of those projects that started small two years ago and has grown more ambitious and more professional than we could ever dream.

I’m really proud to be a (small) part of this initiative; every BDC boad meeting is incredibly energizing because the people in the BDC board really make THINGS HAPPEN.

And if one great thing happens next week, it’s the new web site… normally you should wait till november 5th (at Microsoft Convergence in Rotterdam), but I can’t wait to show you so here’s a  a preview already. And if we managed to do this on time, it’s thanks to pour most inspired BDC board member Kurt Juvyns (who works I think 16 hours a day)  and thanks to Seltec who managed to get the new web site and CMS live on time.