Service Excellence in Action

Craig Macdonald of Micros Fidelio presented a fascinating case study relating to his company's journey towards service excellence. The occasion was our first monthly Software in Action function, hosted a few weeks ago as part of the "Computer Society of South Africa's Software in Action Special Interest Group" - phew! what a mouthful (we call it SIASIG for short). Craig showed how Micros Fidelio uses a suite of Accpac products to seamlessly manage the company. Craig's advice to the audience was to avoid the big bang approach, take a holistic view of the business, start with the reports in mind, and get executives to reward adoption.

I was particularly interested by his description of how they implemented Service Manager. They had to merge and handle duplicates from 2 databases, the HEAT call centre data and their debtors financial data. They use Accpac CRM as a frontend so that they get a single view of each client, including sales, financial, service and helpdesk details. Reports are automatically scheduled by their business intelligence system and automatic escalations alert relevant people according to service level agreements. There are 200 users on the system who are geographically distributed.

When a call comes in, they can schedule a technician if there is an SLA in place, or allocate a sales person to contact the customer. Technicians receive notification to their mobile phones and only need to visit the office to collect parts or drop off payment. Micros Fidelio now has a 24 hour turnaround time for billing because there is no need to manually reconcile planned vs. actual service calls. Dashboarding helps the company to manage proactively by exception, rather than re-actively when a crisis occurs.

Fellow software junkies are welcome to attend future SIASIG events or to suggest speakers they would like to see. Contact events@nfold.com with your ideas or to get more information.

Our MD, Sandy Pullinger, was smiling from ear to ear when she returned from hosting the software panel discussion as part of the IT Confidence Conference at the end of February. She says she felt like a kid in a candy store listening to local CEO's of 4 of the world's biggest software brands give their take on the future of the software market in South Africa this year. Panellists were Simon Carpenter (Dir Strategy SAP); Pfungwa Serima (CEO Microsoft SA); Stafford Masie (CEO Novell SA); Nicky Sheridan (CEO Oracle SA)

She had some questions up her sleeve, relating to common themes she uncovered while reviewing their presentations. There wasn't time to tackle all the thorny issues, but here is the unabridged list of questions she was burning to ask:

• Who benefits from Service Oriented Architecture - the software industry or the customer? 
• How can software better be harnessed to help South Africa leapfrog other emerging countries?
• Can we overcome security & privacy issues as obstacles preventing seamless systems for the extended enterprise?
• Comment on the future of open standards, interoperability and open source software.
• What hurdles prevent us from adopting more responsible business practices?
• How is the local mid-market in SA different from other countries?

Share your views on these and other software matters by contacting subs@nfold.com.

If you sell software locally, here is your chance to get listed in the local software directory nFold is compiling together with Business IT. Click here to refer or register software available locally. The directory will be sent to at least 12,000 business/IT professionals and will be given to CIO's interviewed in the software research we are conducting with Arthur Goldstuck's company World Wide Worx in Sep/Oct this year.