The Challenge of Growth

Most manufacturers and distributors find themselves "beyond lean." They’ve cut significant costs. Usually information technology has had some role in making it happen.

Today, executive attention has begun to shift towards methods to grow revenue. And again, leading industrial suppliers are counting increasingly on technology to help drive sales growth. Among their most difficult challenges:

• Weakened business relationships created by tangled communications between the inside and outside teams who must share information to serve the customer well;
• Unacceptable customer service caused by unwieldy, complex, or even non-working technology interfaces to vital customer and buyer systems;
  
• Longer selling cycles and inefficient sales performance, worsened by the speed of information flow between overwhelmed and distracted customers and salespeople;
• Hidden & uncontrolled profit leaks and cumbersome inventory levels, borne of insufficient information about what’s selling, what’s profitable, and what’s not;
• Competitive disadvantage and strategic confusion caused by too little information and too much guesswork;
• Ongoing loss of vital experience and knowledge as aging workers leave the workforce, taking precious and undocumented know-how with them - out the door.

The problem is: technology used to serve and sell to customers can be complex, and implementation issues can vary widely from company to company. Successfully implementing these technologies requires more than technology expertise. It requires understanding the business, its customers, and how the company goes to market. It requires understanding how customer-facing personnel work, and how to help them to enthusiastically work better. Finally, it requires savvy, disciplined project engineering that can integrate specialized technologies with the complex processes and interwoven relationships that operate both within the business and among its customers and partners.