The Attivo Blog

I was asked to write a blog on a job shop application called JobBoss.  Feeling up to the task I visited search engines like Google and visited websites like Wikipedia to study up on the product and job shops in general.  After a couple of hours I felt I had gathered enough info and completed the initial draft.  I have to admit that I was fairly pleased with my first attempt.  I didn’t think it was award winning of course but not bad for my first blog ever written.  Needing a second opinion I walked into my co-workers office and asked if she would read it.  She smiled and asked me to read it to her out loud.  Feeling like I was back in my 5th grade English class I began telling her all of the amazing information I had gathered, like how JobBoss is the industry leading shop management system for job shops, contract and make to order manufactures.  I explained that over 4,000 shops worldwide use JobBoss to manage their custom make to order manufacturing needs.  I even threw out a couple of definitions of the word “job shop.”  She stopped me half way through and in the nicest way possible said she would rather watch paint dry then to listen to one more sentence.  Unfazed, I countered with the fact that JobBoss fully integrates with QuickBooks!  She didn’t seem as excited about that fact as I was. My confidence bruised I left her office and took my motley little blog into a meeting I had with a marketing “guru” who is helping me along with my first few months here at the Attivo Group.  I meekly asked him for feedback on my writing and hoped that JobBoss’s seamless quoting, order entry, shop floor control, and real time data collection would be enough to peak his interest.  Five seconds in he handed me back the sheet of paper and said that in his 20 years of marketing this was possibly the worst blog he had ever seen written.  He also told me not to be too offended because he is very blunt.  Well in that case, no offense taken I thought! I realized that instead of facts and information sharing a personal story I had with JobBoss might be the more interesting way to go. Several years back I attended Exact Software’s user “Engage” conference and there are only a few things that I still remember well.  One of the things that stood out was the passion/excitement of the JobBoss employees and the happiness of their customers.  I quickly learned the reason for this.  Businesses that manufacture unique, custom made parts are very excited to have an application that can streamline every function in the shop from developing quotes for new jobs to sending invoices for completed work.  I realized these people must be this happy because either JobBoss works and handles all of their custom, make to order needs or they just think the name JobBoss is as cool as I do!

I feel really productive today.  I reduced my emails received for the day to just 5 items that I really need to follow up on.  They are in good company…there with the 16 from the day before, and the 12 from the day before that.  Three days ago was not very productive; some 80 emails remain.  Of course, I probably won’t get to any of them, since tomorrow will come and I’ll be busy again deleting emails or responding to the “emergencies” that appear in my inbox.  In my 30+ years in business, apparently I was never very important until my email started to overflow with things I just HAD to deal with now, or face phone calls (remember them?) with angry people asking why I haven’t responded to their email. Mixed in that morass are 42 seminar invites from associates, jokes from my retired friends and relatives, you know the rest of the stuff that shows up.  At least our Barracuda Spamwall is filtering out the Viagra offers (compliments of Alinco Computers great email hosting). So, here’s some recommendation to solve this all too familiar dilemma: Any other comments and recommendations are welcome!

The Fed told us that the recession is over – What do you do to prepare for the recovery? Chances are you’ll need to create a “new normal” for your business.  If you don’t make adjustments on the way up, the risk is that during the next downturn (there will most likely be one; after all), things will be as painful as they were this time.  Here's my top 5 recommendations: 1)  Assess and improve your processes Look around.  See that crack in the ceiling?  Of course you don’t – you’ve ignored it for the last 6 years, why would you see it now?   A good business process review is in order – a “full 360” examination of how well each process is working will reveal lots of opportunities to streamline your business and cut costs – while positioning for growth.  You want to be able to handle a lot more business without a significant increase in personnel.  Contact me for a free worksheet tool to help you get this done. 2 )  Improve your customer service! Price is interesting, but today customer service is king.  If you can’t deliver on time with high quality products and services, somebody else will.  Invest in customer service improvements.  Delight your customers, not just satisfy them.  Survey them (with tools like Survey Monkey) to make sure they’re delighted. 3)  Shorten your lead times Like customer service, someone else will deliver sooner if you can’t.  Look at all elements of lead times – they’re not all on the shop floor, by the way.  A tremendous amount of lead time improvement can be achieve in the front office, in areas such as quoting, planning, etc.  Lead time reduction is a critical part of becoming a lean organization…so get lean already! 4)  Tighten your controls.  If you have inventory, what is your inventory accuracy level?  No, really, what is it? If you’re going to rely on systems (as you should), one of the key metrics in your operations is inventory accuracy.  It’s at the core of all the assumptions that systems use in their logic.  I’ve heard many a business owner tell me that “we have an inventory problem”, to which I always answer “your inventory system is probably just fine, it’s you’re everything else’ that isn’t working”.  Inventory accuracy is very telling about how well your processes are defined and controlled within the system, and is the best report card for operations to measure their controls.  So, how are you measuring inventory accuracy?  Gut feel?  I wouldn’t buy your company. 5)  Invest in Ecommerce  Still depending on that tired looking electronic brochure of a website that your nephew did for you back in ’99?  Well, welcome to the 21^stcentury.  Your customers and suppliers expect more (see #2 above).  Figure out how to collaborate via the web with your customers and suppliers – it will keep your costs low and your customer service high.  Don’t underestimate the importance of ecommerce, regardless of whether you pride yourself on the “personal touch”.  Consider that generation Y or Z customers communicate differently, and perhaps don’t think they need to speak with you.  What about your South Korean manufacturer?  Staying up until 2:00 AM is not exactly what anyone would call a productive way to spend your time.

What the economic melt down has meant to business consulting and software sales

The majority of our clients have been predominantly smaller mid-market sized companies, typically privately owned, with revenues in the $5-100 million range.  They have been absolutely frozen in place since about October of 2008.  Unable to make any decision whatsoever, they have stopped all spending on marketing, certifications, automation or any kind of improvement initiatives of any kind for their business.  Six months have now passed.  Still no signs of life.  You can probably guess what happened to the business software projects that we were supposed to work on with them.  Forget new system implementations.  The few projects on the street have had so many vultures flying around them that they are hardly worth chasing.  Not a very healthy situation at all. We've made a few very important shifts in our business model that have really helped a lot.  Here's a few: But here's the key - smaller, bite-sized projects.  Instead of $50-150,000 projects, we're working on $5-25,000 projects.  And they are coming from the $1-10 million revenue sized companies.  Not the mid market.  (Still no signs of life there - they still have their hands in their pockets holding onto their wallets). Service industries have less complex system requirements than manufacturers, but they have needs nonetheless.  We are working on some very interesting projects with service companies, and have gained instant entry into the market with the addition of Will Breiholz as our new Vice President of Business Development.   Will is a 12 year veteran of the Intuit Marketplace, and brought along plenty of knowledge and contacts with him. Will most recently served as General Manager for BQE Software, the developer of the popular BillQuick Software.  BillQuick is a professional services time and billing system, that is used by architects, engineers, attorneys and others that need to track their time and bill customers against projects or contracts.  We're implementing tier-two sized ERP offerings such as Exact MAX, Exact JobBOSS, MYSis and Fishbowl that are designed to integrate with QuickBooks for the accounting needs.  This saves clients a significant amount of money, since most can get away with basic accounting, but still need the functionality of bigger systems for their operations management.  This makes a lot of business sense to me.   Not only that, Eunice, the 40-year veteran bookkeeper, does not have to give up her QuickBooks system and learn a new system (which would have killed the deal, by the way).   I don't want to go too far out on a limb with this, but I see this as a real growth market for us. I welcome any and all comments on how you have changed your business in these tumultuous times - we could all use some good hints on how to stay alive!