SMB Stack

Pradeep and I were together at Larsen & Toubro from 1995 to 2001. Pradeep was in-charge of cement sales for Gujarat (a major industrial state in Western India) while I was rolling out SAP at L&T Gujarat. We completed the SAP rollout in 01 and I moved onto join Satyam. Pradeep continued in L&T till 2003 until L&T hived off the cement business to to "Birla Group" (now Ultratech Cement). At that point Pradeep started his on small business trading in cement. He, gradually, added steel , ready mix concrete, cement and clinker export and expanded his business to whole of western India. Today Pradeep runs a Rs 400 crore ($ 20 Million) business all built from scratch in a matter of six years. Of course , the construction boom in India, helped Pradeep a lot in addition to his extensive experice in Infrastructure products.

I got a call from Pradeep three weeks back while he was visiting his daughter at the East Coast. After exchanging greetings and our stories, we settled down for a long telecon. He wanted to put in IT systems to run his business but was little skeptic of cost and ROI given the current economic situation and pull back on real estate / development projects.

As a "die hard" SAP fan , my first and quick solution was to implement "SAP Business One". It didn't take me much to unerstand Pradeep was well aware of new SAP solutions for the SMB segment. However , he felt business and market situation was not ripe enough to get into implementation of a complex integrated systems. He wanted to start with something simple , easy and quick and may be build in baby steps as the situation improves.

I asked him to give me some time for research and hook up next week.

Over last two weeks , I had number of calls with him and together we explored numersous solutions. I gave him a demo of Google Apps , showed him heap CRM. Personally I explored Sugar CRM and how Sugar could be chaeply hosted in Amazon cloud. While we are still in discovery phase , two things came to me which I feel worth a mention here:

1. Theere are number of free open source (or very cheap subscription based) business solutions out there for small businesses. These solutions are there, practically, for every industry.
2. These solutions are good from short term standpoint but long term TOC will be very high coz there is no 'off the shelf' interagtion available.

I guess we all understand both these points, but realizing them first hand gave me a totally different perspective. It also suggested that open source movement needs to be channelized now in the sense there is hardly any value in building a new CRM solution. But integrating existing CRM solutions eg Sugar with other open solutions can be immense business value . For example CRM solutions can be integrated with Google Check Out . HR solutions can be integrated with Linked in .. and so on . Another key area is to put together the methodology and buisiness processes to make these systems easier from deployment standpoint.

I thought the first step is to create a directory of open source solutions and put the information in one place. With this at the back of my mind, I stared working on smbstack where I want to stack good open source business solutions to create a base refrence location.. Hopefully it will grow into something more interesting and of value to to small busienss owners.

Please write to me if you want to contribute or have suggestions ...

SAP Sales and Workflow on Blackberry

Long wait but I saw this available on ecohub today. Not sure if its generally available or not . The Demo of Sales appeared rich in functionality (as usual) but lacking in interface (another as usual).

I had to fill up a long form to access the "Sales demo" which was nothing more than few screen shots. No info yet on the devices supported.

Worst part - You need to contact SAP Sales Rep for Pricing info !!!!!

Red Hot blog of the day

Shutri got the Red Hot Blog of the day , today .

App Dev & Program Management - At Cross roads

PMI has a pretty much "be all one all" approach for any sort of Project Management endeavor. Be it a "Construction Project" or a "Marketing Project" or for that matter an IT project looking either for a new application development or implementation of a packaged solution.

However , things have been changing fast (as expected) when it comes to managing a project in technology space. I think we have interesting time ahead to see how the old project management practices handle the onslaught of Agile method.

I recd an interesting mail from Forrester this morning .. here are the excerpts ...

1. Successfully adopt Agile software delivery methods. Those old processes are choking you, and while many organizations want to become more agile, that shift requires a change in thinking, which isn't always easy.

2. Take a new approach to project management and business analysis. We cling to tradition when it comes to these software delivery practices, so weeding this part of the garden can be difficult. But we know that the old approaches aren't working as well as they must.

3. Optimize the effectiveness of your quality assurance practices.

4. Consider product-centric, not project-centric, approaches. Many traditional IT firms take a project-centric approach to delivering software. They manage the projects, but not the product: the software itself.

5. Re-evaluate and simplify your application platforms. Your application portfolio is most likely as full of weeds as my garden. But the platform landscape is changing, and your choices for efficient, effective application platforms are increasing.

SAP Solution(s) to beat future Mortgage Crisis

One of the main problem in solving current financial crisis is the lack of visibility as to how the CDOs are bundled. Absence of systematic controlled data is adding to other wise uncertain housing market and fueling further loss of trust. This is NOT to suggest that there is no other issue. Sub prime loans are obviously at the heart of this crisis but once again the bigger problem is "lack of visibility" or a central system that could ensure quick and accurate information to decision makers.

There is (obviously) no established business solution to address this functionality at such humongous level. We are talking of having each and every mortgage mapped to the physical building , linked to the first lender and then show how they are appearing under different layers of CDOs ..ultimately tracking to the real holders of mortgage. There can be two ways to implement such system

a) Federal Govt mandates every lender to implement such a tightly controlled system and overview it (the way FDA does for Pharmaceutical companies)

b) Federal govt implements a central system (the way DMV does it for every single vehicle)


One of the potential solution can be to use "SAP Flexible Real Estate Management" as a base system (starting point). SAP Flex is designed to handle the the commercial and residential properties and all the standard business functionality required to run the leasing , renting and contracting etc. Has a good interface with ISRI to show the physical architecture.

SAP Flex can be easily extended to link the mortgage details and ultimately CDOs. Given the fact that SAP solutions are scalable , robust and can handle the enormity of this challenge , I think its a very good starting point for some one in high office who really want to make sure that we don't hit the next crisis just because there was no system to manage the data ..

SAP Portal

As usual SAP was late in bringing the portal out but it once again showed its commitment for holistic approach and inbuilt integrations ..

For the ones who haven't yet had a chance to look at portal .. here is a look .


At a high level - here is why SAP portal is so compelling for the organizations with SAP footprint.

• High speed web access to back-end ERP transactions - If users are on Windows platform , they probably already have the SAP WinGUI installed. Portal can render WIN GUI in web browser and the speed is as if you are working on thick client. Means best of both worlds.
• For the Mac and Linux lovers , portal can call most transactions using either Java-GUI or html-GUI . Html-GUI is little slower than the thick clients but it serves the purpose for occasional users. You obviously need an ITS for enabling html-GUI in portal.
  
• In built integration with MS exchange and Webex. Great collaboration features.
  
• Great document management features eg versioning , subscriptions and manual ordering .. you dont really need other DMS now
• Team rooms are really cool particularly with task management features .
• Universal Work List - Single inbox for all the portal tasks , subscriptions and workflow from backend R3 systems