Ronald's blog on ERP and Business Software

Leaving Exact to join PinkRoccade. And it all comes together.

2011-11-14T16:30:00.010+01:00

Last week, after a little over 17 year at Exact, I’ve resigned from my job. Even though I only communicated this to a small group of my (in)direct reports, such news spreads quite fast and over the past days many people asked me why I made this decision. So I decided to write it in a blog and give everyone the same information at approximately the same time. Also from my own point of view, I do find it important to remain as open and transparent as I've always tried to be.

My motivation for this decision has nothing to do with Exact as a company, the management of Exact or the teams that I've worked with. Every day, I still enjoy developing our products and to work with the talented teams. Over the past months I've also enjoyed working within the technology board of Exact on the plans for 2012 and without revealing any details I can already say that if you believe 2011 was a year loaded with new launches and propositions, there's again a lot of exciting stuff that Exact is going to bring to its customers next year. With Exact Online, a fantastic and highly successful SaaS offering for SME's, Exact has proven it's ready and able to shape the future.

So why leave? Well, for me and my partner Brigitte, a very nice opportunity came by allowing us to build a new house on a beautiful location in Sint-Oedenrode, a village in the south of The Netherlands where I spent a large part of my youth. My parents and family live there as well. For years, Brigitte and me have had a wish to create and develop a house exactly according to our own vision. Even in the period that I worked for Exact in Malaysia, that ambition was there. We also knew that such an opportunity to own a piece of land to build a house upon, was a realistic option...we just never knew when as this had been ‘in the pipeline’ for over 5 years now. Because of some events at the local government over the past period, this opportunity suddenly became a real option and therefore we decided to go for it.

For me, this meant that I would need to find a job in that region as well. I can not and don’t want to travel 3 hours a day in a car for work. Performing my function from Exact’s office in the south is not an option either for Exact as you really need to be close to the colleagues at HQ, not an option for the team and myself. It doesn’t fit my (management) style either which has always been built on personal relationships and face-to-face discussions.

In the meantime, I’ve come to an agreement with another company, Pink Roccade local government in Eindhoven, in the role of director product development. Despite quite an intense/thorough process, this all went pretty fast. I will start my new job in January 2012. At Pink Roccade I'll be responsible for their development group (around 135 people) to bring further growth and innovative solutions. Nice to mention is that Pink Roccade is quite a large customer of Exact Synergy (~400 users) J. So from a supplier, I'll now turn the tables and become a customer of the product I've helped to shape over the past decade. I think the phrase "and it all comes together" kind of fits here!

I'm already announcing my departure at this this stage so there's plenty of time for me to get used to the idea of leaving Exact and to do proper handover of my responsibilities towards colleagues, partners and customers/suppliers.

Ronald

Leaving Exact to join PinkRoccade. And it all comes together.

2011-11-14T16:30:00.009+01:00

So why leave? Well, for me and my partner Brigitte, a very nice opportunity came by allowing us to build a new house on a beautiful location in Sint-Oedenrode, a village in the south of The Netherlands where I spent a large part of my youth. My parents and family live there as well. For years, Brigitte and me have had a wish to create and develop a house exactly according to our own vision. Even in the period that I worked for Exact in Malaysia, that ambition was there. We also knew that such an opportunity to own a piece of land to build a house upon, was a realistic option...we just never knew when as this had been ‘in the pipeline’ for over 5 years now. We all know how fast local governments can be sometimes J Because of some events at the local government over the past period, this opportunity suddenly became a real option and therefore we decided to go for it.

Ronald

All the best for 2011

2010-12-30T12:48:00.001+01:00

The power of ‘No’.

2009-09-12T23:00:00.004+02:00

This week I had an interesting round-table discussion where a few young ICT entrepreneurs, SAP and Exact were attending. The meeting was a preparation for ICT Congres 2009 on October 1^st in Delft, where speakers from both SAP and Exact will attend. Even in this preparation, a heated discussion already took place on open versus closed source software…if you want to witness this yourself then don’t miss the ICT congres. A discussion that intrigued me was about the difference between ICT companies that sell and implement software and who live on customizations, so maximizing the number of hours/services they sell is their main business goal. This is in contrast with companies that just want to sell standard software products and quickly get as many happy customers as possible. An example was given about an SAP partner in Europe who really mastered a few best practices for the industries he wanted to be in and does his utmost not to make any customizations to the solutions he provides his customers. That means often answering ‘no’ to questions for customization and convincing the customer on the power of the best practice, asking questions like “In what sense is your company really unique” or “what would you not be able to do if we would implement this best practice’. This partner went so far as to give his project managers and delivery organization targets where people got a higher payout depending how much their projects were completed ahead of time/budget. The sooner the project was completed, the faster a new project could be initiated and (potentially) a new reference customer added to their client base! Needless to say that this partner is a fast growing one and the customer feedback on their implementations is very positive.

Adding large customizations on top of standard (ERP) software, can easily put a burden on future maintainability, updates to newer operating systems, database platforms or other technology shifts. Not just the customer buying the customization but for the company producing and maintaining the customized software it’s often a tricky situation and not a very scalable model. Exact Software to my opinion could not have grown to its current customer base if all of these customers would have customized versions of our software. So asking the questions mentioned above and saying ‘no’ to requests for customizations, could very well be in the interest of the seller as well as buyer.

In the discussion we had on this topic, opinions on the above were highly different so feel free to comment with your own view on this.

What percentage do you, as product manager, spend on requirements

2009-08-18T14:50:00.004+02:00

This morning I had a meeting with a product manager at an organization that controls national (Dutch) payment products like PIN, Chipknip, iDeal etc. They're working on a slight adjustment of the information shown on the 'Acceptgiro'. During my work within product management at Exact, a considerable percentage of the daily activities of me and my team, is to draw up solid requirements. Of course these requirements are based on a source of input (customers, market research, technology) and we validate requirements with internal stakeholders (colleagues within our operations) and external stakeholders (partners, customers, etc). What was remarkable to notice, is that within the organization I visited, the product manager only spends little time (estimated by me at 1% of his time) on the requirements of this new acceptgiro layout and majority of the remaining time in alignment of the external stakeholders. A small change on the layout, think about printing some additional numbers or references, has such a big impact across the entire channel that uses this way of invoicing and collecting payments, that extensive preparations and validations are needed. Ranging from government, banks to debt-collection organizations and organizations represeting the entrepreneurs. That process could easily take up 1-2 years. Quite an eye-opener.

How much time do you spend on validating requirements with external stakeholders?

EnergieDirect: Customerbility in optima forma!

2009-06-29T21:28:00.011+02:00

Recently I switched to a different providor for electricity and gas. Reason for switching was that I wasn't happy with my previous providor (Eneco) who pulled a few tricks on their customers. I'll not go into detail about how bad (i.m.h.o.) they treat their customers since that would turn this blogpost into a lot of negativity....and I have something VERY positive to share!

After I decided to search for another energy providor, my neighbour told me about the positive experiences he's had with EnergieDirect. He literally told me 'They're a relatively new kid on the block and much smaller then the big guys, but boy are they giving the big ones a hard time with their excellent service". It's not everyday that I hear people so positive about an energy providor so the same evening I went to their website and filled in their subscription form. They claim to take care of the rest.

Well it's been 2 weeks now and I can only say that so far they have exceeded my high expectations by a mile....and I haven't received one cubic meter of gas nor one Kwh of electricity.

What really offsets them from the competition, at least from the 2 other (big) providors I have experienced, is that they really feel like a close friend taking care of you and guiding you through the process. It's in the way they send their emails ("Hi Ronald, things are progressing quite well. We're on schedule for step #2 on June 29."), it's from the extremely user-friendly way you subscribe to 'your' energy page, the way they help you keep track of your energy consumption (and benchmarking) etc Check out the page they show you upon login. To me, I think they may have nailed 'the' perfect' page for this purpose:

The upper section has the usual shortcuts but right below that menu, is where you'll see what steps you're going through in order to make the full switch to this providor . I'm at step #3:

On the right side there's my personal info. Simple, I see it straight away and can edit it with one-click if needed:

Of course I'm curious about what's next. So here's my calendar showing what they're going to do next for me:

and finally, the info on what the current step #3 encompasses. Helps me to understand what they're doing and how they're going to communicate that to me in due time:

Now I know that i've been critical at online forms as well as expressing frustration at attempts by traditional companies trying to organize an online presence with some level of customer engagement/involvement (I've just received the password for My OHRA online website...via regular mail...3 weeks after subscription...via regular mail as well). Right now, I'll openly give all credit to EnergieDirect and the way they're attacking the consumer energy market in The Netherlands.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, they're way cheaper then traditional providors but even if they offered this level of customerbility for the same price, I would still switch!

SQL 2008 support for Exact Globe

2009-04-22T09:01:00.012+02:00

I notice that quite some hits on my blog come from searches with keywords containing SQL2008.

On April 21st, Exact Globe product update 393 has been made general available. As per this product update SQL2008 is supported, running on a Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 server. For small companies, SQL2008 is also suported when installed on a Windows XP or Windows Vista desktop.

If you want to have a look at the unique selling points of SQL Server 2008, please have a look at the overview on the Microsoft website. For an overview of technical documentation for SQL Server 2008, please refer to Books Online.

Exact plans to stop selling SQL Server 2005 as of May 1st. From that moment on, only SQL Server 2008 licenses can be sold to Exact's customers.

SQL Server 2008 licenses grant customers the right to downgrade, which means that customers wanting to use SQL Server 2005 can still do so when purchasing SQL Server 2008 licenses. The upgrade to SQL Server 2008 can then take place at the customer's own convenience.

A complete overview of the system requirements for Exact Globe product update 393 can be found here.

Next to the support of SQL2008, a variety of improvements has been made available to our customers. For Exact's customers, more information can be found in the release notes and in the updated set of database documentation here (access is restricted to Exact customers, so you'll need your username/password for Exact's customer portal).

Building lasting relationships

2009-04-21T17:10:00.004+02:00

It's no surprise that in ERP the new site sales is getting tough. on one hand, ERP has already become a commodity so it's getting more a replacement market and on the other hand the economic situation drives customers to lengthen the lifecycle of their existing ERP investment rather then selecting and implementing a new ERP software package. All this by no means implies that there are no opportunities for new site sales...it's just harder to find them. So how to find the opportunities? One way is to work harder or put more resources on it. I like the idea of investing against the market-trends and showing you're confident to create and 'lead' the rebounce rather then follow it.

But there's other ways as well. I've blogged a few times about the importance of social media and how 'social currency' can earn you trust and build lasting relationships. This starts by at least having a presence on the web, showing who you are, what you stand for and what others can expect from you. Today I was approached by a manager from PWC accountants, unknown to me, who came across my details somehow and apparently found it to be trust-worthy. He was sourcing for an ERP package for a EUR 400MLN company.

Some of the requirements he gave me:

- Should support local legislation in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium

- Support local as well as corporate ledger schemes

- Allow to consolidate financial transactions across the entities

- Able to interface with other ERP systems in order to import transactions

- Solid fixed assets module with parent-child structure

- 20 users but quickly growing

This is right within the sweet-spot of Exact Globe and these are exacrtly the kind of opportunities that I know my colleagues within Exact EMEA can serve very well. A quick call to their sales support department and the ball got rolling today. Will let you know if we win this one and disclose the names.

Is this where the effort from my side ends? No way, for sure I'll be contacting the person at PWC to learn more about his role in that organization, why he is sourcing ERP packages form his clients and how we could establish a lasting relationship...the corp. product management team of Exact Globe happens to be sourcing for an international accounting firm who can assess the level of localization in the 30+ legislations that Exact Globe covers worldwide...

What do ERP and Sacher Torte have in common?

2009-03-23T11:24:00.007+01:00

Piece of cake!

Business process owners at a customer of Exact Software, failed to find a single bug in Exact Globe 392, earning the Exact Globe development team in Kuala Lumpur a sumptuous Viennese “Sacher Torte”

In the past, users at the Exact customer, a pharmaceutical services group headquartered in Vienna, have complained about problems with new batches of Exact Globe, leaving them with a negative attitude toward updates. To create an incentive for the customer to initiate the firm’s standard preliminary testing phase and upgrade to Exact Globe 392, Nicolaas Vos, customer support representative at Exact Austria, came up with the idea to set up a gimmick contest between testers at the customer and developers of Exact.

This was the deal:

If bugs were found in Exact Globe Batch 392, Exact Austria agreed to send the testers at the customer one bottle of Austrian Schlumberger champagne per bug – excluding internal technical issues, such as data format, Excel and printers. However, if no bugs were found, the customer would send a delicious Viennese “Sacher Torte” to the Exact Globe development team in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The large-scale test was carried out between February 16 and 20 at customer's subsidiaries in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Romania, involving different legislations and custom solutions.

The result?

Exact’s developers won! The testers on the customers 'sites failed to find a single bug. Exact’s development team invested a lot of energy in the stability of Exact Globe 392, and their efforts have paid off. Product update 392, which passed three Exact quality control levels, internal testing and a pilot phase, went into General Availability on January 5, 2009. And now our developers have shown they can meet the expectations of even the most skeptical of testers.

Surveys? First find out how customers use your ERP system

2009-02-17T11:41:00.004+01:00

A lot has been written recently about ERP customers being less willing to invest in new ERP systems (replacing existing systems) but rather are seeking an extension of the lifecycle of their existing investment. An excellent opportunity for ERP vendors with a large customer base to:

further engage their customers,
tighten the intimacy and listen
Make targeted investments in their product offering and start deep-selling in order to...
..increase the ROI for these customers on the investments they did

So all we, as software vendors, need to do is ask the customer what they would appreciate most. Start a huge customer survey and off you go....but is it really that simple?

From a product management point of view, what would you want to achieve with a customer survey? How should it help you to get answers to questions you have? Here’s my view on this.

How are customers using the ERP software?

1. What products are they really using? For my case, are they using just Exact Globe or has Exact Synergy also been implemented and is being used

2. What functionality are they using (what modules). Maybe they really only use a fraction of the modules they purchased. A module that is active in their license, doesn't mean it's being used (how about ROI on these modules....)

3. What reports are used a lot, what reports are never used? An ERP system, at a very high level, is about users keying in data in order to produce output (documents) and reports to get better control. We need to understand the usage of reports.

4. How many users are using a particular functionality. For example: a customer could have 20 users where 18 work on sales order entry only and 2 on financial control applications. Or could have 90% of their users work with requests every day but zero using documents. Tells a lot about the adoption of your software within a company, could even be good input for further training of users in other areas.

5. How big is the ERP administration and the growth? How many transactions every day? Tells us a lot about the intensity with which the software is used

The answers to all these questions can quite easily be retrieved from the internal logging in the Exact database but also from the SQL database. André van de Graaf, a colleague at Exact Software's Research & Innovation group and Arjen Boers, a colleague at Exact's Customer Support expert center, have developed an application Exact System Information Tool that can retrieve the answers to above questions, analyze it, even come up with recommendations for the user and store it in a central repository at Exact Software where the anonymous statistics can be further interpreted and used as input for product decisions. Soon, a blog post with an explanation of the application will be made public, it's currently in a controlled phase and only deployed at selected customers.

How can the software be improved?

Back to the initial idea: a survey to decide what those 'targeted investments' should be. Once we have insight how customers are using the ERP software, we can determine a subset of our customers and ask targeted questions for possible improvements. If we know which customers are using the MRP overview for their production process every day, we have an excellent opportunity to get in contact and ask for input on future improvements. Or customers who are using the XML replication to export data to Exact Synergy, could be targeted with questions on the consolidated scenario or Synergy financial consolidation.

Another idea you may think of is to virtually ‘give’ a subset of customers a bag with 100 coins in it and have them assign these coins to 10 possible areas of product improvement. These areas would be given by Exact based on the suggestions/input we already have or the conclusions we draw from the statistics we get. In order to get targeted feedback we can use a survey like Surveymonkey or a community like the Advisory Groups in LinkedIn as a platform.

When talking about a subset of customers, I am not necessarily referring to a market segment nor a horizontal or vertical 9functional) distinction. It's rather a group of customers who have something in common and that may even be, as an example, that they both are heavy users of cost centers and cost units within their financial administration.

What is not the goal?

For me, the goal of a customer survey would not be to get an uncontrollable and endless list of all possible product suggestions in all possible areas. I would rather have targeted questions or do more intense follow-up sessions with a few targeted customers.

If you’re using Exact Globe or Exact Synergy and want to participate in the final phase of Exact System Information Tool, then please comment or drop me an email at Ronald.Voets(at)exactsoftware.com

Hunt or bait?

2009-02-16T21:55:00.006+01:00

Managing a product or working in a product management role can sometimes be a pretty challenging job...in any business but certainly in the software industry. The perfect product manager constantly has to balance the allocation of (limited) development capacity between maintenance of existing product and increasing short term customer satisfaction versus development of new products or enhancements. Put too little capacity on maintenance/bug fixing and the product development organization will get hit by angry customer support staff demanding fast(er) resolution times. Put too much capacity on maintenance and you'll not be able to present anything new to your target market and have Sales/product marketing at your desk...This balancing act can easily lead to some tension between product development and product management. I think that as long as anyone recognizes each others role, respects it and openly communicates about it, such problems can be prevented. Sometimes, making a joke at a high tension moment can help to cool down the situation a little bit. So for all you product managers out there who want to tell a light-hearted joke to the geeks at product development...here's one for you!

A truck driver decides he needs a rest, parks his truck and walks into a bar. There he notices a sign on the door that says "Prohibited for geeks. Entry at your own risk." He knows he's definately not the geeky type so continues and walks into the bar. He orders a beer. The bartender asks the truck driver for his profession and upon hearing his answer, pours him a beer.

Now another guy, a 100% typical geek, walks in and orders a coke. The bartender doesn't even ask a question, grabs his gun and shoots the guy. Dead. The truck driver is really upset and asks the bartender why he shot the guy. He answers "There's way too many geeks in Silicon Valley and it's officially open season now, so anyone's allowed to shoot 'em."

The truck driver finishes his beer, steps into his truck and continues his journey. Suddenly he's forced to break very hard. His truck starts to slip and the cargo falls off. As a result, all the boxes with computers and LCD monitors are spread across the road. In no time, a lot of geeks stop their vehicles to quickly collect the stuff and carry it home. The truck driver, having the bartender's story fresh in his mind, decides to grab his gun and wildly starts shooting the geeks. At that moment a policycar stops and warns the truck driver to stop shooting immediately. The truck driver, all confused, yells at the policemen "But there's way too many geeks in Silicon Valley and the hunt's officially opened." Says the policeman "True, but you can't use bait!!"

(fun is one of the 8 values of my employer)

Quality Management in Exact Globe ? Check!

2009-02-04T16:21:00.004+01:00

I believe I'm an example of the fact that RSS is for non geeks too. Via Google reader I get my daily news on interesting blogs I follow, the results of some pre-defined searches on news with keywords like "Exact Globe" , "Exact Synergy", "ERP" etc. Most searches return only a few news items every day, so it's easy to skim them and be up-to-date on what's being published on the web on the items you're interested in. It's my daily newspaper, also when there's a storm outside and free of charge.

It was via one of these Google alerts that I checked a post on another ERP blog and read about ERP systems offering "quality assurance, test or compliance data elements and routing them to the appropriate people to action." Hmm...sounds very interesting and it made me think about the Quality management module of Exact Globe. Then I started to use Google to search for "Exact Globe" and "Quality Management". Surprisingly, I couldn't find any useful info on this module published on Exact's website. The good news is...there's actually plenty of solid material available internally, just not on a public level.

So now, here it is for everyone to read (and find via Google!) : the factsheet of the Quality Management module within Exact Globe(pdf).

If you already have Exact Globe within your organization and are using product update 390 or higher, then adding this module is a breeze that can be done in a non-disturbing way to the rest of your processes. See for yourself whether this solution benefits your organization and could increase the ROI on your existing ERP implementation!

The role of a Communication Officer for successful software development

2009-02-01T22:58:00.005+01:00

Today I read a blogpost about the role of a coach for successful software development. The story reminded me of an interesting discussion I had last year.

A friend of mine works at one of the world's largest oil-companies and was put in charge of a project to implement an ERP system (SAP) throughout a large part of their organization. The first thing that is worth mentioning is the composition of the team, located at HQ: 100+ people and consisting of Business consultants, Business Intelligence and reporting experts, Functional SAP experts and Registered Accountants (compliancy is of major concern). Other disciplines were allocated to the project if and when needed. This team's main challenge was to understand the business requirements from their operations, challenge those requirements and eventually translate that into requirements for their ERP system, mainly on the documents/output/reporting side since changing the application's logic itself brings a lot of additional complexities.

The software development part for their requirements was outsourced to an Indian company. In the first year of the project, the development part could hardly be called a success. People in the project team felt they had to over-specify the requirements, had to fly a lot to India to meet the developers and explain their requirements but yet didn't get delivery according to agreed (or at least communicated...) deadlines and overall there was not a sense of one team working together on common goals. A classic blame-game was about to start.

It was at that point that a Communication Officer was introduced. Someone from the local background (India in this case). It was not, as I expected, someone who was at the location of 'the troops on the ground' but he got stationed at the oil company's HQ for the duration of the project (a few years). His goal was, not surprisingly, to smoothen the communication between the functional people in the project team and the technical developers. He judges how messages are brought across to either side, what the tone needs to be, who to approach for what type of communication. If you're not used to dealing with people from a different culture, in a totally different environment then yours, then it's not weird that exactly the resulting (mis)communication is the barrier that blocks successful software development. I have seen this happening in other places as well, where two groups (both very eager for success, capable and passionate on what they do) are not achieving the maximum result simply because there's a mismatch on the coimmunication part.

For the project I referred to, the Communication Officer was a huge success. The fact that he got stationed at the HQ and was a fulltime part of the project team, meant that he had the trust of the project team and was one of them. on the other hand, the cultural and emotional distance for that Communication Office to the software developers in India was not big, apart from the physical distance theyre in. Oh yeah, this person was not an expert on the functional part nor the the software development part. But soccer has taught us that you don't need the skills of your team's individuals, to be a good coach :-)

Do you have any experiences having someone in charge of Communication, in offshore or outsourced software development?

Code of conduct on personal blogging part II: Comments on competition

2009-01-21T16:47:00.005+01:00

Some time ago I wrote a post about code of conduct on personal blogging. I've received quite some reactions on it so it seems to be a relevant topic. Based on the feedback I've decided to deepen the part on 'write about or comment on the company’s competitors'.

- Comments about competitors are almost by definition a 'dangerous' area to publicly write about. After all, it's fully understandeable that you want to promote the product or service you're bringing to market. That's where you're passionate about...So you may easily go a bit too far in your enthusiasm.

- Let's not forget that the employees working at your competitor are probably as proud of their products/services as you are on your company's product. So any negative comment about their company, will quickly be perceived as a direct attack and could lead to negative reactions. Last thing you want, both as a person as well as a company, is a public catfight on the web

- Your comments about the competition should be respectful. Don't slash, insult or hurt persons or companies.

- What you can do, is to educate the reader:

Give a factual explanation about what your product does. Of course it's OK if you mention those points where your product/service is better compared to the competition. The reader can make his own conclusions...
Refer to external websites that make comparisons between products/services, showing your product/service in a favourable way
Don't be the messenger of criticism, but refer the reader to websites where customers give positive comments/reviews on the products of your company. Do you have stories or videos of reference customers available? That's excellent material to refer to.

Ronald

P.S. 1 This post outlines my personal views and do not necessarily represent the opinion of my employer.

P.S. 2 Image by www.wilcherish.com

I'm not here to be in a relationship

2009-01-15T23:52:00.004+01:00

In an earlier post, I wrote about online forms and only asking what you really need. If you want to do a basic validation, then ask for a username plus a password and skip all other fields where people are asked (forced) to enter information. Oh yeah, and if the username is actually an email address, then please call the entry field ‘email address’.

Today I came across a nice example of a company who did just that: keep it simple and only ask for email address/password on their e-commerce website….and still massively failed. Why?

Customers who had already entered items in their shopping basket, were asked only the moment of ‘checkout’ to enter their email address /password. To do it at that stage, scared the prospective buyers away from the site and stop shopping. As one shopper put it "I'm not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something". The remedy to solve the problem was very simple: add a button ‘continue’ even though the user didn’t have an account. Websales rose 300 million USD in 2008 and this was published as ‘the 300 million dollar button’.

So what’s my take away from all this, in relation to product management?

Preferably have an opt in for customers. Don’t force them into submitting information (the relationship) and if you do, accept the consequences of less click-through and visitors leaving your site
Related to that, be very careful with requiring a login account. It’s better to give the visitor something ‘extra’ when he has a login, like additional information, personalized news, remembering his preferences, pre-filling webforms etc. Without such a login, the basics of your site should still work. Basics in this respect means the main goal of your website, what are you trying to achieve with it
When designing a web application (or product for that matter), don’t assume customer’s behavior but involve them in an early stage. This example could have been caught at requirements stage
But knowing how challenging it is to always involve customers in every project you do/decide/design as a product manager, even during piloting or right after launching you should have a mechanism to trace a customer’s behavior. Simply to know what your customer is doing, how he uses the product, how often, what sequence, etc. If you notice that 90% of your website visitors leave the site with a ‘full’ shopping basket at checkout time, then you really need some alarm bells in pace to start ringing. Google analytics is a tool I find handy for such analysis.

I also want a 'Twit This' link below my blog post

2009-01-07T22:48:00.006+01:00

Since I'm a frequent Twitter and start to see the value it can bring, I want to have a 'Twit This' below all my new blog posts. Preferably before our Research & Innovation director manages to tweek his javascript and achieve the same :-)

I've found a detailed instruction here and have done it step-by-step. Will it work?

Update: so far...FAIL. Still checking...meanwhile I did see the Tweet This link on 'the other' site :-(

Update 2: thanks to this article, I managed to copy in a Tweet This link. Still working on the outlining...

2009-01-03T17:17:00.005+01:00

Last week I made a post on online forms. I used the website of Dutch Water Dreams (DWD) to make a point. Even though my first experience with DWD wasn't all that good, I still went there. Came in the building and explained to the person at the counter that I wasn't able to fill in their online form for all the attendees since a) I didn't want to fill in all the details they asked for and b) none of the kids has an email address. They gave me this piece of paper (''offline form''):

What was remarkable is that now none of the fields is mandatory (...) and no longer are email addresses needed for the kids. I hd to handover the completed form to the ´bodysuit´counter and as far as I could check, that´s where the useful life of the form ended. I guess this only strenthens my point that a company needs to think carefully what data they require their visitors to disclose and fill in.

Now about the experience itself. In one word FANTASTIC. The kids and me went for an hour of ´bodyboarding´ and I find it truly amazing how close this experience comes to ´the real thing´. The experienced staff were very patient and friendly with young kids. Next to us, was the flowboarding which looks like a thrilling adventure as well, though not very suitable for young children. DWD looks like an excellent place for a company outing, provided you´re in for some physical activity and fun.

Another year, another set of resolutions

2009-01-02T14:48:00.009+01:00

Happy new year to everyone, hope you are as eager as me to make 2009 a success :-)

At the start of a year, some people love to look back, write down the stuff that particularly caught their attention and analyze what happened. I'm not gonna do that for two reasons:

- I already write down on this blog what triggers me and is worth, to my opinion, to write about. Whatever I find interesting, I share via my Friendfeed stream so I'll let you judge for yourself what's interesting or not in those feeds

- Second reason is that it's not anchored in my DNA to spend much time looking back and analyze how things could have been done differently (better?). I am, at least I think I am, a forward looking person with a positive attitude, focusing on what seems possible based on today's knowledge. That's why I so strongly support motto's like 'A bad decision is better than not making any decision' and 'grabbing opportunities in challenging times', something I wrote about earlier and a recent post by Aad 't Hart as well.

What I will do, is write down some forward looking statements on what I aim to do in 2009:

Try to further embrace Exact's customers/users and eco-system using social media as a vehicle. Recent initiatives on LinkedIn (example 1, example 2) and Twitter, show that this can pick up a nice pace with surprising discussions and feedback.
Evangelize social media within my team and company
Join at least one sales cycle every quarter
Answer customer support calls or incoming emails for 1 day every quarter
Do 1 day of billable consultancy every quarter
Keep up the nice rhythm of Exact Globe product updates, continuously showing our customers value for their (maintenance) money and making the ERP offering more complete and competitive.
Try not to be pursuaded by my kidz to buy a Lego Millennium Falcon. Gosh, that model is cool...but already faced a hard time to build this simple model
Run once a week (Reason? Let's put it this way; it's not because I like it)
Sell my appartment in Breda
Unexpectedly, go for a holiday

Have fun in 2009!

Online forms: just ask what's really needed

2008-12-28T22:58:00.008+01:00

Some time ago I read a great post by Matthew Niederberger on online forms. The article is in Dutch and my take-aways were:

When using online-forms, always justify 'What' and 'Why'
Determine what information you really need the visitor to give you, in order to reach your goal.
Within your company, who will be using the info and how?
If you want to get information in order to re-use it and generate leads, then usually a name plus email or postal address or phonenumber is sufficient

Today, I had to think of the above when I called Dutch Water Dreams to make a reservation. I want to take my 2 sons (6 and 7 years old) and 2 of their friends, to go bodyboarding and 'flowboarding'. I heard good reference stories from friends about Dutch Water Dreams and it seems to be a very cool experience. So gave them a call, made the reservations, so far so good. Next, they send me an email to confirm my reservation. Attached to that email, is an MS Word attachment with a reservation number and password and I'm asked to go to their website and agree to their terms and conditions.

Quickly surf to their site, where I get a login (note: the site has 3 language options but this part which every customer is asked to go to, is not translated...)

Next is the online form and that's where the fun really starts :-)

Remember that at the point I fill in this form, I have not visited Dutch Water Dreams yet, I have not paid them anything and am not a customer yet. I'm 'just' a hot prospect who is trying to confirm his interest. What's wrong with the above online form (to my personal opinion) is at least:

1. Why ask for my gender? Does this have any influence on whether we are allowed to participate or not? Does the choice I fill in, serve any purpose when we're at the scene?

2. Date of birth. Sure, maybe there's a minimum age for the activities. In that case, just ask to confirm that you're older then this minimum age. I can imagine very well that first time visitors have a problem revealing their date of birth. How secured is this information, once submitted and what purpose does it serve to Dutch Water Dreams to know this info? It's a mandatory field...and I don't even know the exact dates of birth for the 2 friends of my kids

3. I am forced to give them my phone number. Something I am very reluctant to do. Will they (or a callcenter) call me to make other offers if I don't return after my first visit?

4. Perhaps the worst one, is email address. For every person you want to confirm for the activity (5 in my case), you must specify an email address. Now in my case, it's me and 4 kids. So what's the problem Ronald? Just fill in 5 times the same email address? No way! There's some really cool logic that does not allow you to re-use an email address you've already entered. My kids don't have an email address yet so that means I would have to fill in some fake email addresses.

In the end, I've decided not to fill in their online forms with fake data but just submit 1 email: a link to this blog post :-)

Curious to see their reaction and hope they'll do it publicly by commenting on this post.

And the winner is...

2008-12-23T22:18:00.003+01:00

WOW, just read that my submission for 'tips for entrepreneurs in challenging times' was selected and so I'm going to meet Richard Branson on January 20 during the Big Improvement Day !

Currently receiving a lot of congratulations from colleagues. This focus on entrepreneurial spirits and 'can-do' mentality is something I hope Exact Software will keep for many years to come.

Is a corporate 'Code of conduct' on personal blogging needed?

2008-12-23T17:16:00.004+01:00

Just had an interesting discussion with a colleague on whether a company should have a 'code of conduct' on personal blogging by its employees.

My opinion to this, is that any code of conduct is not specific to blogging, it holds true for whatever publicly available information or comments you write on the web. it's your personal footprint for years to come. Anyone writing public information on the web, must have enough 'common sense' to understand the impact of what he's writing. For those that do need some guidance in understanding what's acceptable or not, there could be some obvious codes of conduct like :

Don't reveal confidential information
Related to the above, is not to give remarks on the company's financial performance and future products
Uphold your company's reputation
Don't attack colleagues, customers/suppliers or shareholders. You may disagree with the company and its management, provided your tone is respectful and not a pesonal attack.
You may write about or comment on the company’s competitors, as long as it's in a respectful way
Never write when "your life is in turmoil and/or you're unhappy." Scobleizer blog (radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html

In line with what I wrote earlier in my posting 'You can't stop it anyway', companies must accept that they can no longer control all the information within their organization. So don't make the policy too extensive and rather base it on some core values, in the case of my company I'm thinking about Trust, Honesty and integrity.

I selected a few quotes from other software vendors on their 'policy' towards personal blogging by their employees:

"We do not tell people to blog or not to blog or what to say," IBM Vice President Jim Finn said. "We don't control them. ... It's more like, 'Go explore.' "
Jason Goldman, manager of Google's blogger product, said bloggers should ask themselves the question: "Are you going to be embarrassed by what your mom or children are seeing, or what your boss is seeing? It's like asking: 'Am I going to be embarrassed by what I'm wearing today?'. Google doesn't have explicit guidelines, but it allows employees to blog based on the premise that "they are reasonable people."

Some companies even greatly promote blogging by their employees. Staying in the software world: Sun has a publicly accessible site (www.blogs.sun.com) which has 1,300 employee blogs.

Does your company have a formal code of conduct for blogging? Any experiences to share?

Using Exact Online for your personal financial administration

2008-12-22T22:01:00.007+01:00

Many of us will probably track and categorize their personal finances in some way. I've never done it...until today. I have two reasons for doing this

After spending 8.5 years of my life in a country with effectively almost a zero-tax rate (if you're an expatriate), I'm now back in The Netherlands where the government knows very well how to widen the gap between gross and nett. So I want to keep track of my personal P&L in an easy way. I really do not want to spend a lot of time on it
Get real-life experience with Exact Online (Software as a Service) and experience how (if) it can be marketed to keep track of someones personal finances. I already have experiences with Exact Online for running an administration of a company, but not a personal one. The requirements of the latter are materially different, more simplified.

So here's the steps I took and the effort needed:

[1 minute] Requested the Exact Online helpdesk for an additional administration. Got an answer within 15 minutes: administration is created and I can login via https://start.exactonline.nl
[1 minute] upon first login, Exact Online will ask me if I want to run a wizard to create my administration and fill it with 'defaults'. I chose for 'Non-vat administration'. Within 30 seconds my personal administration was created and I could start straight away. Excellent!
[5 minutes] Login to my bank to download the bank statements. If you're using electronic banking with ABN AMRO, that's a little hard to find...it's not under 'Services>>download bank statements'...but under 'Payments>>Overviews>>Download transactions'. Rabobank is much more intuitive to my opinion, they have a menu entry 'Download'
[15 minutes] Before being able to import my bank statement, I need to define the bank accounts I have. Kind of disappointing to be honest. I've seen other software that will recognize and create these bank accounts 'on-the-fly' during import of your first bank statement. Anyway, this means I need to define 1 journal for each bank account. I'm also asked for the main/sub classification of the bank account and to create ledgers for them. Can imagine this is a little hard for someone who hasn't done any accounting yet...
[1 minute] Import my bank statements for period January 2008 into Exact Online
[60 minutes]Start assigning every imported bank line to a ledger (like 'Groceries') and optionally to an account as well (like 'Supplier for Electricity'). Important: do this byconstantly creating 'auto-assignment rules'. By doing so, the next time you import a bank statement, Exact Online will know to what ledger and account this line can be assigned to. So you're constantly 'teaching' the system and after a few imports, that greatly helps to reduce the time for manual classifying your bank lines. So to create all those auto-assign rules for the first month's bank statements, took me 1 hour. I'm curious to see how much less time February's statement will take

More tomorrow...

Seasons greetings to my followers

2008-12-22T21:40:00.001+01:00

Improve performance of Exact Globe by reducing MRP records

2008-12-18T17:04:00.008+01:00

In an earlier posting, I wrote about the sometimes complex tablenames within Exact Globe. Probably the most famous (or notorious) one is GBKMUT. Some colleagues within Exact have come up with ideas how to improve the performance of Exact Globe's logistic and production processes, by greatly reducing the number of records in this GBKMUT table.

I've decided to start a discussion in the Exact Globe user group within LinkedIn, to try and get response to our ideas from outside Exact: customers as well as implementation partners and resellers.

Of course I could have emailed a lot of external stakeholders that are within my network and known to me, but for me this is a try-out to see how social media like LinkedIn can be of use for starting a discussion and getting contributions from people I may not even know

...and validate the claim that 'nobodies are the new somebodies'.

If you do not want to subscribe to linkedIn to join the discussion, feel free to leave a comment and I'll make sure you get invited for the Webinar on this performance improvement topic.

on the same topic, also interesting to read is optimizing indexes by André van de Graaf.

Software land in stormy weather? Grabbing the opportunities

2008-12-18T11:31:00.004+01:00

In an earlier post I wrote about the fact that the 'art' of selling ERP software has become far more then just shipping boxes. Selling of ERP solutions to mid-sized companies, has become far more professional. As the solution my company offers, becomes more complete and yet remains cost-efficient, we see several companies taking a critical look at theirexisting Tier 1 solution and seriosuly considering to step over to other solutions to lower their TCO and still offer a good solution for their business needs.

Just 3 examples:

Earlier this week, a Dutch newspaper (Financial Dagblad) had an article about Rituals Cosmetics being 'Saved' by Exact. The company was spending an incredible amount of money keeping the oracle system going and was slowly heading towards bankruptcy. Last year they started migrating to Exact Globe.

Today, Exact announced that PGGM, a Dutch pension administrator and asset manager for the social work sector, has chosen Exact Synergy as a replacement for its current Peoplesoft HR and payroll software solution.

Tomorrow, I'll be visiting another customer who decided to replace their SAP solution with Exact Globe and is now in the process of migrating.

To me, these are clear signals that we can grab opportunities that were hardly imaginable a few years ago, especially now.