“Our software is killing us,” says Garth, an overzealous team lead who might attain his grand career aspirations once he controls his bad breath.

You know he’s right. But where do you start?

After you pass Garth a mint, you need to put on your thinking cap.

Before you launch a RFP and walk the gauntlet of demos and shuffle beyond myriad of feature function check-boxes, there are a few key areas to explore.

The most important one is: your customer, be they internal or external.

Your team may have many reasons for not liking your system. Perhaps your customers do as well. Some customers may touch your software often, some may not. With the proliferation of self-service tools, they ought to be interacting with it regularly. Who wants to pick up the phone and check on the status of an order or return? In our Amazonifed world, self-service functionality is king. If they aren’t interacting with your software or its outputs with some frequency, that is a first clue your current software isn’t stacking up.

You also need to do a little sleuthing around lost accounts. Was your software part of the reason for the loss? From there, look at non-selection of prospective business. Were there systematic limitations that prevented you from being selected? Understanding the why they left or why they didn’t select you tells you where your software isn’t making the grade.

When it comes to hunting for new business, your software should be part of your value proposition, not something that makes you sweat when the topic comes up. A granular analysis of potential software issues should also be conducted on service failures and other current and past customer complaints. Can’t access these complaints and failures easily?Ah, perhaps there is another clue your software is failing you. Even if you have multiple software packages you need this information at your fingertips.

How do we get answers to these questions? The best ways are to pick up the phone and create an electronic survey. The phone call will allow you to understand the emotional side of the software interactions and the survey will give you a boatload of data.

Also, make sure to query a range of people within your customer’s organization. Everyone has an opinion. Asking multiple people, the same question should help you determine what is real and what is personal bias.

To get you started on the survey, here are five bits of data you need to understand about your software as well as your clients.

Reliability

You’ll need to think through how you ask this question as the customer may not necessarily know where the information they are getting is coming from. A simple question might be: “How confident are you that when your order ships, you’ll get an email from us notifying you of the shipment?” If the software isn’t reliable, no one is going to depend on the information generated by it. Customers will typically use other labor-intensive approaches such as a telephone call.

Accuracy

How accurate is the information your customers gets from your software? Again, you may need to think about how to phrase this question such as, “How accurate are the monthly reports we send you?” If the information you are supplying your customer isn’t accurate most of the time, you’re having customer service issues. That results in more phone calls and emails to your team asking questions and running up labor costs. And, if they don’t trust your data, they are probably using work-arounds, such as MS Excel (ugh!).

Visibility

There is an uncanny ability in the software industry to ask users to input a lot of data, either manually or through integration. Until more recently, being able to view this data was not readily available. Ask your customers: “When they need information, how easy it is to access? Can they get all the information they need? If not, what is missing?”

Cost

When it comes to cost, “what is your software costing your customers?” Maybe there will be the intangible costs of “I just don’t like your customer portal”. More likely, there will be tangible costs your customer is incurring. The short-shipped orders, the myriad of telephone calls and emails, the MS Excel spreadsheet rodeos. At best it is costing them real labor. At worst, they are bleeding customers because of it.

The Crystal Ball

Ask your customer: “what will you need tomorrow?” If you decide to buy new software aimed at today’s requirements, you could own yesterday’s software by the time your implementation is complete. Ask your customers what they see their needs to be in the future – from months to years. Again, ask a cross section of individuals in your customer’s organization. Your customer’s CFO and Customer Service Manager will give you different answers because their needs are different.

Performing this exercise will give you a good idea of where you stand with your customers and not just purely from a software perspective.

So, now that you have an idea of what your customer needs from your software, what’s next? Your organization’s software needs.

At Infolog, we believe in the art of simplicity. And we practice that daily, infusing technology into our Logistics and Supply Chain software. The result is streamlined workflows and superior information visibility. Simply put we are all about increasing productivity. Contact Infolog today to find out more.

 

Easy? Just get it installed, give your people a bit of training a few days before and it will all go smoothly yes? No. No again. Swapping out your WMS is a major change as it is one of, if not the most important software system in your logistics business. Planning the change carefully and monitoring progress during the implementation are key. While occasionally WMS implementations fail due to “poor software”, most fail due to the human elements around planning and execution. This brings me to the first part of the WMS Change Management Process:

The People

Your Team:

Start by identifying the key staff you will need to help select and implement the software. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to ensure you have a wide range of team members. Stacking the selection and implementation team with IT and Finance isn’t going to be a winner. Why? Those teams are not the ones that are going to be using the system day in and day out. I am not saying you should not include them, but ensure you have good representation from Operations. Make sure you have a mix of roles from the Operations team as well. Team diversity reduces risk.

Training:

Don’t just give each department 4 hours of training the day before going live. Start your training months in advance. Use real life scenarios, don’t sit your warehouse operators in front of a desktop computer. Get them on the hardware they will be using and run real life like scenarios. Do this in meaningful but manageable time slices, like 1 hour. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again. Repetition is your friend when it comes to retention.

Your Customers (Internal and External):

The WMS change is going to affect your customers. You really hope it is going to a positive change. You can take steps to make sure it is. Engage with your customer well before you have implemented the software. I am not suggesting that you get them involved in the selection process, but just after the project has started is a good time to socialize the upcoming change with your customer. Prior to go live, give them a demonstration to show the forms, reports, alerts and other customer facing outputs they will be receiving. Customers don’t like surprises, so don’t spring a new WMS on them on go live day!

Other Stakeholders:

This is between my team and my customer(s) only? No. This change impacts many more stakeholders, like perhaps your customer’s carriers. Let them know what is going on once you get closer to go live. They can help you be successful. You can help them adapt to change, its mutual self interest. Perhaps you will offer an online appointment booking tool for carriers. Offer to train the carriers staff in the use of it. If you don’t how much do you think the booking tool will be used by them? In today’s world self service is key. Invest in some orientation and training, you will reduce labor costs and gain some ROI from it.

The Systems

While you are changing only the WMS, there is most likely going to be an impact to other systems, both yours and your customers. Quite likely you have these system integrations:

  • Internal integrations to ERP, TMS etc.
  • External integrations to customer systems. Either through EDI or API

As with people, planning the change regarding your other systems is critical. As an example, with your internal integrations, you may want to enhance or increase the frequency, types and amounts of data you want to exchange with the new WMS and your other systems. There are some real benefits to looking at this and improving the information exchange. One example is, perhaps your customer service people who use the ERP have no visibility into order status in the warehouse and must call down to the warehouse to inquire about an order? This wastes time and costs you labor. Why not have the new WMS send order status updates to the ERP as the order flows through the warehouse? Once you have spec’d your integrations, insure they are developed by your team or your vendor in a timely manner. You don’t want to be testing the integrations a day before go-live. Test early, test often.

External systems integration can be challenging. They are multi-faceted. But they are critical and integrations must be configured and tested prior to go live. Nothing is going to anger internal or external customers more than the order interfaces failing. Having said that, typically you can’t just call up your customer and say, “right can we test some integrations tomorrow?” As mentioned earlier, engage your customers in the beginning of the implementation. Plan for multiple rounds of integration testing, well before your go live date.

Monitoring Progress

Ensure you set weekly meetings and I suggest daily meetings 3 weeks or so before going live. If you have selected a quality vendor such as Infolog, you will have a project plan to follow to track your progress. Hold your team and your vendor to target dates. Missing the date on one item can have a trickle-down effect on others. As an example, if your integrations aren’t ready to go and you need to print data from your customer’s order file on your BOL, you won’t be able to test your document.

Encourage constructive criticism. Its a complex project. Stuff is going to happen. Nothing would worry me more that every week my team reporting everything is fine, there are no issues. You want the truth. “yes men” will doom you to failure.

Thanks for reading. Careful planning, execution and monitoring of the implementation will ensure a smooth transition.

At Infolog, we believe in the art of simplicity. And we practice that daily, infusing technology into our Logistics and Supply Chain software. The result is streamlined workflows and superior information visibility. Simply put we are all about increasing productivity. Contact Infolog today to find out more.

 

When your shiny new software that promised to save the company millions of dollars in efficiencies is greeted by a series groans and frowns, you have a problem.

Why? Because today’s iPhone-driven culture dictates simplicity. Is your software easy to use?

Anything more than two clicks away is like trying to find the hottest restaurant in town using a compass and a hand-drawn map.

According to a Deloitte [1] consultancy, your users should be able to execute 50% of their daily tasks directly from the home screen. They should not be more than two clicks away from the other 40% of their daily tasks.

The cost of poor software design cost the US economy more than $3.1 trillion a year [2].

Where could this money be going?

The Land of Lost Productivity

If applications are hard to use, employees will lag with engagement and, worst yet, may avoid using the application entirely.

If an employee wakes up every morning dreading logging in and using your applications what are the chances they have indeed.com job alerts on their phone?

The Island of Opportunity Death

What prospective customers have you failed to attract to your business due to software usability issues?

Did they find your software cumbersome? Worse yet, you never reached that stage because your sales rep couldn’t be bothered to enter prospect details into your clunky CRM.

The Valley of Unhappy Customers

If your customers aren’t happy with your software, they – like your employees – will wander off like lost children never to be seen again.

So where is your ROI with new software? Nowhere.

Do you remember the spreadsheet calculations your vendor showed you that your new system would pay for itself in three years due to the new applications? If your people aren’t using it, you may just as well have burned your money.

At Infolog, we believe in the art of simplicity when it comes to our supply chain and logistics software suite.

People ask me, “Well Richard, I don’t want a simple solution, our business is complex.”

It is true that business requirements can be highly complex. My reply is we deliver a simple user interface as part of a sophisticated software application.

This is where the challenge lies, and many software companies fail because it’s more difficult to build a simple user interface than a complex one.

A user interface is typically designed to present a set of data and actionable items to a user. The less labour intensive UX design methodology spends little time on tailoring the data presentation and allowed actionable items. Everyone sees everything. Regardless if they can action it or not. The result is confusing and hard to use software. Tailoring the data presented and the actions available by current operational environment and user or role is much more challenging. But this design methodology provides for superior software usability.

At Infolog, we gently infuse technology in a way to simplify the end-user experience.

The result is streamlined workflows and tailored information visibility.

Simply put, if the end user’s life is simpler, we are all happier. (And more productive).

Contact Infolog today to find out more.

Links

[1] https://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2012/09/10/enterprise-software-why-the-user-experience-matters/

[2] https://hbr.org/2016/09/bad-data-costs-the-u-s-3-trillion-per-year/

Your first boyfriend or girlfriend. You remember how that maybe ended badly? Should you have broken up earlier? There is something that keeps us bound to dysfunctional relationships when we are younger (hopefully we have grown).

In business, why do we repeat these relationship mistakes with our software providers?

Because, even as the relationship ceases to work for us, our optimism hangs in there in hopes it will get better. It doesn’t. This dysfunction often drags out as a co-dependent relationship that both you and your service provider cling to.

Dump it. You will be glad you did. But what are the lessons we learned? You want to avoid your past mistakes. To do that you need to understand you and your vendors responsibilities and boundaries in the new relationship.

And this is how you do it:

Over communicate. Your new relationship is a dance between you and your provider. You spend time together getting to know what you need and how they can help you fulfill all your requirements and wish lists. With most software providers the team that sold you the software is not the one implementing – making that dance even more important with a shifting team.

When we start dating, we shave, shower and put our best foot forward, right? It’s not different with a new software provider. Make sure your best people are a part of the implementation team. Ensure your team does its homework when it comes to current software and operational processes. Meet well in advance with your team to review the findings and map out what you want your future processes to look like before you even engage the vendor. Remember, software is a tool, its up to you how you use it.

You never show up late for the first date, do you? Well same goes here. Make sure you respect the project schedule and keep your word when it comes to action items.

But you are one half of this relationship. Your date (whoops provider) owns the other half. You know what a bad relationship looks like, so you want to be sure you steer clear of that. Here is what you should expect from your provider in this new relationship:

You are not looking for a one-night stand. You want a long-term relationship that will meet your needs. You need to be compatible. The new provider’s staff needs to be knowledgeable in your vertical and engaged in the implementation process. You will instinctively know right away if the assigned team won’t be a good fit. If it isn’t, speak up! Your new provider also needs to commit to project continuity. It is very important that your provider commit resources that will be involved for the entire lifecycle of your project. A revolving door of vendor staff throughout the life of the project will add time, expense and risk to your project.

To build trust in this new relationship your new provider must provide you accurate financial estimates about implementation costs. If they don’t your enmity grow like a relationship with someone who won’t leave the couch and their favorite bag of chips.

Make sure they are punctual. Meeting deliverables on time in the software world is one of the best ways to know you have found a reliable, ethical provider.

Finally, ensure your project has a champion within the software provider. This could be the an executive, sales rep or director of services. Keep this champion on speed dial. The minute you think things aren’t going to plan contact them. Hoping for the best never works out!

Okay, so what have we done here?

We established the ground rules for both parties, we engaged in a meaningful way to build a relationship, and we have created solid lines of communication. That will translate into a happy, healthy relationship where we learn from each other and you both are all stronger in the end.

And who doesn’t like a happy ending?

At Infolog, we believe the sale of our software is just the beginning of a long term, mutually rewarding relationship. Happy customers breed great success stories of the quality of our solutions. Contact Infolog today to find out more!

 

Your first boyfriend or girlfriend. You remember how that maybe ended badly? Should you have broken up earlier? There is something that keeps us bound to dysfunctional relationships when we are younger (hopefully we have grown).

In business, why do we repeat these relationship mistakes with our software providers?

Because, even as the relationship ceases to work for us, our optimism hangs in there in hopes it will get better. It doesn’t. This dysfunction often drags out as a co-dependent relationship that both you and your service provider cling to.

Dump it. You will be glad you did. But what are the lessons we learned? You want to avoid your past mistakes. To do that you need to understand you and your vendors responsibilities and boundaries in the new relationship.

And this is how you do it:

Over communicate. Your new relationship is a dance between you and your provider. You spend time together getting to know what you need and how they can help you fulfill all your requirements and wish lists. With most software providers the team that sold you the software is not the one implementing – making that dance even more important with a shifting team.

When we start dating, we shave, shower and put our best foot forward, right? It’s not different with a new software provider. Make sure your best people are a part of the implementation team. Ensure your team does its homework when it comes to current software and operational processes. Meet well in advance with your team to review the findings and map out what you want your future processes to look like before you even engage the vendor. Remember, software is a tool, its up to you how you use it.

You never show up late for the first date, do you? Well same goes here. Make sure you respect the project schedule and keep your word when it comes to action items.

But you are one half of this relationship. Your date (whoops provider) owns the other half. You know what a bad relationship looks like, so you want to be sure you steer clear of that. Here is what you should expect from your provider in this new relationship:

You are not looking for a one-night stand. You want a long-term relationship that will meet your needs. You need to be compatible. The new provider’s staff needs to be knowledgeable in your vertical and engaged in the implementation process. You will instinctively know right away if the assigned team won’t be a good fit. If it isn’t, speak up! Your new provider also needs to commit to project continuity. It is very important that your provider commit resources that will be involved for the entire lifecycle of your project. A revolving door of vendor staff throughout the life of the project will add time, expense and risk to your project.

To build trust in this new relationship your new provider must provide you accurate financial estimates about implementation costs. If they don’t your enmity grow like a relationship with someone who won’t leave the couch and their favorite bag of chips.

Make sure they are punctual. Meeting deliverables on time in the software world is one of the best ways to know you have found a reliable, ethical provider.

Finally, ensure your project has a champion within the software provider. This could be the an executive, sales rep or director of services. Keep this champion on speed dial. The minute you think things aren’t going to plan contact them. Hoping for the best never works out!

Okay, so what have we done here?

We established the ground rules for both parties, we engaged in a meaningful way to build a relationship, and we have created solid lines of communication. That will translate into a happy, healthy relationship where we learn from each other and you both are all stronger in the end.

And who doesn’t like a happy ending?

At Infolog, we believe the sale of our software is just the beginning of a long term, mutually rewarding relationship. Happy customers breed great success stories of the quality of our solutions. Contact Infolog today to find out more!

 

A new car will make me a better driver, right?

Of course, it will.

It will also make you six inches taller, three times as handsome and will give you the charisma of George Clooney. Unless you are a megalomaniac narcissist who wants to rule the world, you won’t believe a word of the above sentence.

However, that logic is pervasive for many leaders when they are looking for a new Warehouse Management System. And it’s common thinking among their own staff too. To get an accurate idea of what you need and why you need it, you need to do a little homework with your team.

Bias bogeyman

Your software doesn’t have emotions. Your people do. Determining your needs may be more difficult than you think because of the built-in biases of your own staff. Let’s delve into potential biases.

If your last software implementation was akin to a two-hour root canal, there is a good chance your staff may still be suffering from trauma. Tread carefully. To get the real answers, you’ll need to ask specific questions that won’t elicit an emotional response.

Another bias is the people on your team are acutely aware that machines are making employees redundant at an alarming rate. They may not consciously communicate this, but it is a fear. “Will a better system replace me?”

Every situation and organization are different, but emotions play into people’s feedback. Cultivate the feedback loop in the way that encourages your team to take a more holistic approach when it comes to your organization’s software. Most of your people use software frequently in their daily lives. Have them benchmark the features and performance of your WMS to the software they use in their daily lives.

Also, ask them what the software is doing well and what it does that your customers cannot live without (the customers may not even know this). Finally, gather suggestions for improvement not only with a new package, but in your current application.

The spreadsheet rodeo

Ask your team if they use any other applications to support their daily tasks beyond the WMS. For your Operations teams, beware the spreadsheet rodeo. It’s 2018. If your team spends a lot of time in MS Excel, it’s a clear sign your software sucks.

Be sure to ask your IT team the same question. Third party applications can mask a lot of basic functionality deficiencies. Third party reporting tools are an example. There are some great packages, but if your IT team is spending a lot of time building reports and your Operations staff is having to go to another app to run reports, this is costing you productivity.

Need for speed

Ask your team if the system performance is acceptable. How long does an inventory query on a product take? Slow systems make your people tear their hair out (see emotion above) and there is a labor cost. If there is a five-second lag in Operators getting the next pick task in your current system and you process 1,000 orders a day, that is close to an hour-and-a-half in lost time per day. Is that acceptable?

Reliability rational 

Your team’s confidence in a system directly relates to its reliability. This takes two paths, one for Operations and one for IT. For Ops, perhaps ask your folks: “Does the system automatically and reliably alert you of potential short shipments?” Beware the labor costs of unreliability with this type of notification – multiple report generations, calls, floor walks and worse, service failures.

For IT, (stability) questions on how much system administration work they must perform will give you a clue to how much effort your IT team is putting into keeping the application running. Worse, they may be outsourcing it to your WMS vendor or another party and costing you significant sums. Spend time with your IT folks on these questions. Are they performing herculean tasks to keep the application going? If so, that is costing you productive time. Also, what if their herculean efforts fail? In today’s world you can’t even afford a one hour outage.

Integrating integrity

Query your team on the integrity of the system. Do they trust the information they get from the application? Careful here, areas such as inventory accuracy also have a human element. To avoid the human equation, engaging your IT team to assist by evaluating the database integrity may be beneficial. There may be a correlation to the amount of third party applications your people are using and your data integrity. The common lament of the failed: “I don’t trust the system, so I am tracking it on my own spreadsheet”.

Support 911?

Ask your team about the level of support you are getting from your current vendor.

How many issues are you logging a month?

How timely are issues resolved?

How much are you paying for support?

When it comes to the last question, remember that even if the software company is fixing your issues for “free”, you are still spending labor on recording, follow up and testing of software issues. Ask your team for examples of where the software may have contributed to service failures. All of these are ongoing costs to support your current application.

Team analysis

So, you’ve asked these questions and told your people to provide feedback based on their expectations on software in general, not just what their expectations are through the lens of your current WMS. By going through this exercise, you should have clear candidates for your selection process and implementation team. If you haven’t stop now and refocus.

Your new car isn’t going to make you a better driver unless you have the ability and willingness to embrace the new technologies your car includes. The same goes for a new WMS. If your team won’t embrace your vision and doesn’t have the ability, bandwidth and willingness to implement a new package, you’re better off staying with the old.

At Infolog, we believe in the art of simplicity. And we practice that daily, infusing technology into our Logistics and Supply Chain software. The result is streamlined workflows and superior information visibility. Simply put we are all about increasing productivity. Contact Infolog today to find out more.