From DOS To DRM
Knowledge management: how to separate the wheat from the chaff
How change can take place across a chain of outlets with good planning, good management, the right product, the right vendor and just a little forward thinking.
Mister Minit had been using Dataspeed - a heavily customised DOS based system – as its core financial management system. however, being in place for over a decade, the system was getting old. There was also a lack of available skills to support and upgrade the system to meet emerging business requirements.
In need of constant upgrade and modification, the old system was therefore placing a significant strain on budget, internal resources and data exchange across the business.
It became patently apparent that a new system was required to manage all aspects of the evolving business - everything from back end accounts, procurement and inventory, through to training, quality processes and marketing, and to property leases and expenses.
With a $250,000 budget for the change, and after a six-month tendering period during which four solutions were explored, the team at Mr Minit opted to go with The Sage Accpac Suite. Elia Napiza, Minit Australia’s IT Manager explained to IDM that, Sage’s solution, “…best met all the requirements of the multiple business units: we felt secure with a large international software vendor, and Sage Accpac along with its network of third-party developers offered plenty of off-the-shelf options to further extend the system at a later stage.” Once selected, a server upgrade was provisioned as, “it was anticipated that we would need two additional servers, one for Sage Accpac CRM and our intranet, and a second for the Sage Accpac ERP and databases.”
Once the hardware was in place the implementation process of both the CRM and ERP systems within the company took six months.
LAN Ahoy!
Speaking about the implementation process, Napiza brings in another strand, telling IDM, “Sage Accpac is designed to be very quick and easy to install and customise, so data transfer was very speedy and the users adopted the new system easily and willingly. Also critically important were the rapid deployment methodologies used by Lanworks. They pre-scripted many of our processes, including historical data uploads, which reduced the amount of time required to deploy and bring the system online.
“Minit is currently transitioning to a 100% franchise-based operation, and a significant accounting change is required to reflect a store moving from a ‘wholly-owned’ to ‘Franchise’ entity in the system. This process would traditionally have been manual, but with Sage Accpac, Lanworks has scripted the process so it is now automated to dramatically reduce the effort.
“Standard reports in Sage Accpac weren’t sufficient to support Minit’s complex business model changes, however Sage Accpac Insight - a business intelligence tool – provided all the reporting flexibility and functionality required.”
Changes
Napiza talked about the change management issues, “The company took a big leap forward in technology, which required extensive user training. Users had to forget DOS capture commands, and learn new commands for the Windows-like Sage Accpac system, for everything they did – from printing to major report queries. The impact of this change should not to be underestimated: users are somewhat slowed at first, but as the Sage Accpac system is so intuitive, enormous advantages soon outweigh the initial difficulties.
“That said, the inbuilt best-practice workflow of the Sage Accpac solution introduced many improvements to the way in which Minit operated,” he continued. “In particular, a number of activities had previously been forced into a manual process to compensate for the inadequacies of Dataspeed, and Sage Accpac simplified and automated these. Such significant changes naturally created disruption as employees learned to adopt and trust them, but this pain was more than justified by the greatly reduced administrative overhead within the business.”
Cutting It
Barring his opinion that the web-based AccPac client is somewhat bandwidth intensive, Napiza is fulsome in his praise of the entire operation, telling IDM that, “The exceptional flexibility and customisability of Sage Accpac CRM, which allowed Lanworks to develop it into a comprehensive property management system. It now maintains and manages all of Minit’s store lease agreements, rental and ongoing cost invoices, and automatically pushes relevant data into Sage Accpac ERP for payment through the normal Accounts Payable process.
“Until now, it’s been a case of manual filing. But Sage Accpac now holds all documents issued by the system, and records documents produced by external systems and filedmanually. Ideally, in the long term, Lanworks would like to see Minit hold all content in Sage Accpac ERP or CRM systems – but this isn’t cost-justifiable at the moment.”
> Advice for Others
Having managed such a transition from the CRM and ERP equivalents of the Stone Age with few if any major glitches, using a system integrator and vendor, Napiza has plenty of advice to pass on to others thinking of meeting similar challenges. His major learning experience relates to the relationships that need to be created. The vendor and integrator must be aware of the business model but have the flexibility to build on it – and around it - , “Make sure you’re working with a vendor that has systems with open architecture so that you have the option to integrate other (affordable) off-the-shelf products, or customised solutions as you need. It’s the best way to future-proof your options. Also, work with a systems integrator that can think outside the square.”
“Our new system was required to manage all aspects of our evolving business, from back end accounts, procurement and inventory, through to training, quality processes and marketing, and to property leases and expenses.
“Because of the scope of these requirements, the project could easily have blown out to include several industry specific applications – all of which would have required costly extensive customisation or even development from scratch.
“However, rather than force us into an additional expensive custom-built system to handle our changing business model, Lanworks tweaked Sage Accpac CRM to give us an effective and affordable solution, that really is delivering an ROI.
“Combined, Lanworks and Sage Accpac delivered us
with a powerful business solution, which not only supported our existing business processes but also encouraged us to improve them.”
The project could easily have blown out to include several industry specific applications – all of which would have required costly extensive customisation or even development from scratch.
Elia Napiza, IT Manager Director, Mint Australia
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