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Many of you in the distribution industry are still wondering how much more change and future technology will impact your company. Will major producers, large chains and group alliances use the net as a weapon to replace you, the small to medium size manufacturer? Will you become road kill consumed by the vultures of platform roll-ups? Or perhaps the Internet will administer a slow, withering death, painful and extended. Forget it. Banish that thought. When the dust settles you will still be around. The magic of the Internet is not really magic. Emerging technologies behind e-commerce are not going to kill your company tomorrow or the next day, or the next day after that. But, they are also not going to go away. However, E-commerce with regard to wholesale distribution has predominantly been hype and it is overrated, which is the case with most great technological revolutions. The impact of E-commerce has been overrated in the short-term and will probably be underestimated in the long run. Undoubtedly technology has changed the way we think. The Internet has created a new channel to market but consider the failure of dot coms. The e-tailers of the world have suffered dramatic stock downgrades in spite of overall unprecedented growth rates. One of the major enlightenments realized by many dot.com companies who no longer exist (besides having a poor business model) is the fact that they lacked distribution experience Don’t fear E-commerce Fundamentally, the emerging technologies supporting it are nothing more than tools that have the potential to improve your business processes. You have to learn to use them to your advantage. Get in the game and E-commerce will no longer look like a threat. Industry experts proclaim that various instruments of E-commerce represent a broad paradigm shift. The reality is that a large number of complex systems must be implemented successfully to fulfill even a portion of their grand vision. This doesn’t mean that new technologies adopted by E-commerce can’t have a revolutionary effect on your business, but this effect will be limited by how much improvement evolves in the basic business process. People still like to do business with people That won’t change in our lifetime and it may never change. Learn to deal with it. The way to deal with it is to broaden your understanding of E-business and use technology to your advantage. As a wholesale distributor with the level of margins available in your industry, you can’t afford to be on “the bleeding edge of technology;” however, you are going to have to be in the game. An E-business strategy is actually a subset, or subordinate to, the company business strategy. Don’t make the mistake of confusing E-commerce with E-business E-commerce is selling product via the Internet as many of the dot coms have done; E-business is utilizing the technology of the Internet to improve your processes and take costs out of the supply chain. Many distributors don’t really have an E-business strategy. Their value propositions to their customers and suppliers are unclear with little or no hard data. Most are limited to talking about the quality of their people (unqualified) and promoting service (unmeasured externally) mistakenly as a core competency. From an E-business perspective it is critical that distributors have facts and data to answer the following questions. If you are going to build an E-business strategy out of fear, based on long standing perceptions and opinions, the market will expose these assumptions in an expensive or painful fashion. • What are your key value propositions to your customers? • What do your customers think of you as a supplier, compared to their competitive alternatives? • What are the key sources of pain or frustration for your customers? With answers to the above questions, combined with a real business strategy, an E-business strategy can be completed. So – have no fear Customers will continue to choose you in the future if it is to their advantage, just like in the past. Today, however, a lot more thought goes into deciding whether or not what you provide is to their advantage. Are you taking away their pain and frustration? How do you compare to their competitive alternatives? In spite of what many of your salesmen tell you, price is clearly NOT the only determinant of advantage. Most of the distributor salesmen have some fear of the Internet: “Will my role stay the same based on new technology and the web?” “ Will I be replaced or become obsolete?” “Will E-commerce replace the need for distributors?” “Should I buy an orange grove and move to Florida?” The answer to all those questions, except, perhaps, the last one, is NO! There is no doubt that market dynamics will change. However, the most resilient will survive. E-business technology will replace or improve transaction activities currently performed by sales representatives. Sale force automation, customer management packages and new communications tools will allow sales representatives to be much more effective in their pursuit of new business. These technologies are not a threat to you! They are your weapons, your defense used to battle E-commerce. They will assist you in maintaining competitive advantage. The new E-business sales rep will focus on growth and new business prospecting and penetrating existing accounts in a different fashion than they did in the past. Analytical tools will become commonplace used to assess potential and targeting based on ideal customer criteria. Laptops and palm pilots will become standard equipment. E-business technology is the way to manage multiple customer complexity, multiple product complexity and provide value by reducing cost in the supply chain. Use the technology tools available as a sales representative. E-Commerce is not the threat it’s perceived to be and E-business is your ally Silver bullet---knowledge management What’s coming next will be presented as if it were magic, the “silver bullet” to solve all your organizational problems. In a few years E-commerce will be old news and some distributors will have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars while others will have gained significant benefits from e-business technology as the industry goes through major change. “Knowledge Management will be the next wave of why you need to spend money now.” For all you “Trekkies” out there, think back to the old Star Trek TV series. Captain Kirk could ask the Enterprise computer anything and he would get exactly the right answer.” “This new millennium “Silver Bullet” will capture all of the wisdom and experience of your employees. Your customers, vendors and employees all benefit from having the right information at their fingertips making the right decision.” IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun and a host of others have been making huge investments in knowledge management over the past few years. The announcement last year on the Microsoft digital dashboard represents the first of a series of new product. Over the next year many new solutions will appear on the market. Like E-commerce and most emerging technology, the short-term hype will be much larger than the reality. The blood leeching level of transition If you compare where we are today on ‘Knowledge Management’ to medicine, you would conclude that we are at the blood-leeching solution level. It will be many years before there is anything to go buy that will provide that silver bullet. Having said all that, knowledge management will become very powerful and real world impacts can be achieved now for a lot less money than the cost of an E-commerce catalog. It is not really a technology availability issue; it is a work design issue. The technology requirement is minimal and many organizations have at least part in place now. It requires some kind of Intranet or Extranet on a client server network with employees’ station PCs that provide high-speed access to the web. Basically all technology tools can be purchased at Staples or Office Depot. So, how does this relate to the threat of E-commerce to distribution? The bottom line is that you can circumvent any threat (real or imagined) imposed by E-commerce by using E-business strategy to your advantage. Don’t panic The secret of E-business is actually pretty easy. It lies in the fact that you will always feel somewhat overwhelmed by new technology, feel behind and be unsure as to your next step. If you sit there and do nothing, you, in fact, have made a decision; a decision that paralyzes you into total inaction. It’s also just as deadly to overreact and get on the “bleeding edge of the technology revolution.” Many technology service providers sell a promise that if you spend “tons of money” and put their package in, then you will be caught up overnight and hit a home run. This is not a cosmic truth. The fact is you will never be “caught up.” As soon as your solution is in, a better one will come along. A more balanced approach is recognizing that you need an E-business strategy that complements and integrates into your overall business plan. The very first and most important requirement for E-business evolution is effective involvement and leadership. Now is not the time to whine about E-commerce, multiple channels and eroding margins. Now is the time to act and use E-business as a resource and asset. Become a Web Head Evangelist Create competitive advantage with E-business strategy and your fear of E-commerce will subside. Any senior executive who offloads his E-business strategy to an IT (Information Technology) department is making a mistake and will not achieve the desired objectives. You must come to the critical understanding that this is a process, or a journey and not a destination. This process must be led from the front line where the senior executive understands and develops the strategy to the point that he qualifies himself as a “Web Head Evangelist.” The bottom line The bottom line is that E-business technology will continue to progress at a rate that is almost unbelievable. Each advance eclipses the one preceding it. As microprocessors become more powerful and less expensive, they become more commonplace in day-to-day use. You need to grow your business with an E-business strategy that takes advantage of these advancements, gaining abilities in time and scale. The world is creating a technological edge that has no boundaries. You cannot be afraid of it! You cannot ignore it! You must be a part of it. You must use it to your advantage to retain or create competitive advantage. SaleHoo: Wholesale Distributor Directory. - The Leading Source for Wholesale Suppliers and Manufacturers. Affiliates earn 75% Get Your Federal Firearms License 2006. - New 2006 Ffl Kit to Help you get your Federal Firearms License and Buy Guns Wholesale. We Are A Licensed Dealer. This is a guest blog post written by Dave Kawula, a Senior Consultant with 1E. Dave was the guest on our January episode of the AlignIT Manager Tech Talk where we talked about how IT managers can take the risk out of their Windows 7 deployment projects. Here Dave outlines a key strategy to employ at the very beginning of your project and some of the tools that you can use.
As the clock keeps ticking towards end of support for Windows XP we need to find ways to accelerate our Windows 7 Migrations. Just because you accelerate your Windows 7 Migration you don’t have to increase your budget. In fact what if you could do the opposite…accelerate the project and reduce cost. Wait a minute – this is an IT Project. The words “reduce costs” don’t really exist in a typical IT Project. Well maybe they can… Most Windows 7 Projects I have seen project over 80% of the costs for that project on Application Packaging and Remediation. What if there was a way to have an organization quickly rationalize their deployed applications. What if there was a way to remove unused software from a desktop prior to the migration. I can sum it up in one word: “Rationalization”.Well there are a couple of tools out there that can help us out with this. One is the Application Compatibility Toolkit “ACT” from Microsoft. It is a great tool that allows us to gain insight into our organization. This unfortunately requires an agent to be deployed on the workstations and requires us to scan them to see what is installed. Then pull the information back to a central database and try to analyze what is deployed. The second tool is one that many of you will already own and have probably deployed. Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager has a software metering component that will allow us to use simply scan the machines using the Configuration Manager agent. One problem this requires a lot of configuration and won’t automatically pull back unused software to keep licensing in check. The third tool is one from 1E Software call AppClarity. You can checkout a link to this product here: 1E AppClarity I have personally seen AppClarity give money back to an organization in less than 60 Days after the acquisition of their software. Think about it…why waste money getting shelfware or unused software ready for your brand new Windows 7 Desktops. Once again “Rationalize” not only the amount of software that needs to be migrated to the new platform but also the amount of work. Checkout the screenshot below of this software package. It has revolutionized the way I approach Windows Migrations.
So in my perfect world that I live in I need a tool that will do the following for my Windows 7 Project:
If you can drive cost savings at the start of this project you will be well on your way. Gartner has estimated that it costs on average between $1000.00 to 3000.00 + per desktop to migrate to Windows 7. Most of this cost comes from the work required to migrate unused applications. What if you could get back all that time and save hard dollars by removing shelfware before your projects starts. This makes your project sponsors very happy and allows you to accelerate this project. Deployment costs reduced by 30 % simply by “Rationalizing” the number of applications that need to be ported to Windows 7 and automating the delivery mechanisms for the images. You could easily save over $90,000 in soft costs out of the gate. Reduce the amount of Software Renewals, Support, Deployment, and licensing costs. Once again we “Rationalize” all of our apps. Assume a 50% savings for your organization what does that return? How about an estimated 1 /mil + savings in hard and soft costs. By the way – now that you have a tool that helps rationalize this – think of the savings the next time the licensing police come visit you. I hope you have enjoyed this post and I welcome any feedback or if you want to share your experiences with your Windows 7 projects thus far. About Dave Kawula
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Dave Kawula is an MCSE and CNE with over fifteen years of experience in the IT industry and a senior consultant with IE. His background includes data communications networks within multi-server LAN/WAN environments. He has experience with project management, network strategic planning, network design and integration. He has led the architecture for NT, SMS/SCCM, Exchange and Internet Gateways, including managing migration paths and issues as well as implementation. He has supported a variety of network infrastructures as well as architecting and defining technical standards.