The Business Agility Blog

If you’ve been keeping up with the business agility blog, you probably read last week’s post about Telecom Channel Portals. Telecommunications is one industry where I predict business agility will ultimately be a key success factor for its major (and even minor) players. The reason I can predict this confidently is that business agility combats unpredictability, which is a characteristic of telecommunications. Its products and services are always changing, its margins are usually shrinking, and yet its buyers are rarely completely satisfied. Sounds like a tough position to be in, but the business agility blog is here to help – so let’s take a closer look at one of the three agile apps I wrote about in the last Telecom Channel Portals post.

Marketing Portal with an ROI

If we start at the basics, ‘marketing’ is defined by the American Marketing Association as: the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Mendix agile transaction portals, such as your average marketing portal, smooth out this set of practices, and help all parties involved increase their productivity.

Providers can manage and update collateral, and even add videos, brochures and product information. They can manage campaigns and other documents, and take advantage of versioning so that they’re always up to date. By doing so, they market their service to agents and partners while they provide the marketing materials necessary to win business. It’s a win-win situation from the provider perspective, because they make life easier for resellers, which directly affects their bottom line.

Marketing Portals with Flexibility

This all sounds great, but your average marketing manager wants little to do with updating and managing the actual software solution they are using. Fortunately, this is where the idea of IT and business agility come into play. Research and Development at Mendix is always looking for ways to increase collaboration between business and IT – that’s why we love features like visual modeling tools and one click deployment of web apps.

Needless to say, the tools are out there to make managing these portals a piece of cake. Adopting an agile methodology to software development is step one, as my readers know, to attaining business agility – and a marketing portal is a good place to start. Being able to easily update the portal with product and service lists is vital in this industry, where products and services change constantly.

Disseminating information, especially marketing materials, can be a difficult task for channel managers to deal with. And all too often, it is a task that everyone ‘deals with’ – rather than proactively manages. Marketing portals can be integrated with your system as a ‘portlet,’ or you can build an overview portal that uses data from underlying systems. Using a combination of cloud computing, and agile applications integrated with back end systems, telecommunications companies can quickly and easily increase their bottom line.

Telecommunications companies are looking to cloud computing to clean up inefficient processes throughout the sales channel. The products and services in this industry change so often that these companies have become more competitive than ever, with continuously shrinking margins. Flexible front end solutions bring agility to the sales process, providing a future proof solution to front office and extended enterprise portals.  As the masses continue to frenzy over new data pumping smartphones, internet connected television, and television connected internet – these organizations continue to face seemingly unparalleled challenges in business agility.

So begins the first of a series of blog posts titled “Telecom Channel Portals 2.0”  in which I plan to discuss a few interesting ways that telecommunications companies will benefit in a new age of software. Software as a service is fundamentally changing the cost structure of information technology, and industries in which competition for profits is the fiercest will ultimately be the earliest adopters. The following three applications are common areas of interest for telecommunications companies looking to enter the Saas realm.

1. Marketing Portals

When products and services change as often as they do in the telecommunications industry, disseminating that knowledge throughout agent channels (partners and direct marketing/sales people) is extremely important. Marketing portals give agents and resellers access to up-to-date information from any browser. Sales in this industry are driven by intensive campaigns for which supporting marketing materials and product/service catalogs need to be readily available. There is no better way to manage and to provide this information to agents and resellers than via an online portal.

2. Quoting and Order Entry

Online portals for quoting and order entry increase direct business value for telecom providers and resellers. On either side of the equation, stakeholders get data faster and more accurately, which speeds up customer acquisition while minimizing costs. Telecom providers become more attractive to partners, and the list of benefits goes on and on. By making it quick and simple for the sales channel to give and take information from their provider, business agility is greatly improved.

3. Commission Automation

Online portals can go much further than displaying and collecting information. By including logic into an application, the functionality and time saving capabilities become endless. All too often, we see gigantic excel spreadsheets used for finance-based processes such as tracking commission payments. By automating this process, time is saved, errors are avoided, and transparency is increased. Online portals can be automated and customized for recurring commission structures based on the type of partner and product/services being sold.

These are just three ways that online portals are changing the way information is managed in the telecommunications industry. The reliance on information is so great that adopting cloud computing is almost inevitable. Keep an eye out for more “Telecom Channel Portals 2.0” posts on the Business Agility Blog.

“Mendix enabled us to automate our business processes in a way that is flexible and future-proof.”
Cor de Koning, head Processes and Automation at Agis

“The application implementation cycle with Mendix is the fastest I have ever experienced.”
Philip Augur, Chief Operations Officer at Arch Re Facultative

“ Mendix enables us to make the production chain more transparent and more efficient.”
Joost Prins, Supply Chain Director, Sanoma

“Mendix offers us not only future-proof solutions; it also provides the necessary development power and flexibility.”
René ten Hove, ICT manager Kwik-Fit

Time To Market: 1.5 Months

• Media Agencies have access to their own self‐service portal, allowing them to file complaints much more easily. They can also track-and-trace the complaint.
• Enhanced collaboration between NRp and its advertisement agencies, by eliminating the need for unnecessary correspondence via phone and email, automatically keeping track of communication history and complaint handling status
• By centralizing all data, NRp was able to monitor KPI’s, continuously improve process performance, and manage the quality level of its regional newspaper operations

As an intermediary between customers, media agencies and publishers, NRp is responsible for selling advertisements on behalf of the regional newspapers in their portfolio. The company also has to accurately distribute advertising material and customer order information to the publishing companies. Due to the large number of placements (over 100,000 per year) and the complex processes, a regular stream of incomplete or wrongfully published advertisements exist that need careful review or correction. Most errors consist of administrative problems like wrong publish dates, page numbers or production problems like slight differences in print color. Media agencies reported these errors with a formal complaint, demanding compensation.

Download full case study

“It’s not the strongest who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin. The big and powerful vs. the small and agile – what we know about dinosaurs rings true in modern business agility.

Remember dinosaurs when you were a kid? You were so fascinated by them that you memorized the names of the meanest and ugliest lizards to ever roam the planet. Impressing your parents with your enormous knowledge of extinct reptiles as they ponder the fine line between childhood pastime and signs of a future serial killer… Survival of the fittest, in the era of the enterprise, uncovers a new definition of what is ‘fit.’

Agility = Survival

It’s funny that the small, agile creatures of the Jurassic period are the survivors with relatives still gracing our ecosystem hundreds of millions of years later. The small and medium businesses of today have a much easier time adopting agile practices as well. In fact, if it wasn’t for this crazy idea of “too big to fail” – we may have witnessed yet another mass extinction of corporate proportion in 2009.

Large corporations face large obstacles as they transform their legacy IT systems into future proof, integrated solutions. Even so, business agility is scalable. Agile applications provide an unparalleled return on investment because they can be implemented and modified extremely quickly. And most importantly, they are made to stand the test of time.

I suppose the moral of this story is that business agility can be considered a corporate value that needs to be implemented when a business is small. The reason giant companies are having a difficult time staying agile is because their environment, like the dinosaurs, just got a whole lot different. We’re in a technological age of fiber optics and cloud computing – forces that can shadow the cold blooded creatures of our own time if they don’t sharpen up.

Sure, the media loves to talk about the big guys and their billion dollar assets, sharp teeth and heightened sense of well, bureaucracy– but by now you should realize that technology is giving companies the upper hand in making decisions faster, implementing strategy more efficiently, and surviving meteorological catastrophe (so to speak).

Time To Market: 3 Months

• Self-Service portal offers one-stop-shop for HST’s full range of transport and logistic services
• Significant improvement in sales support can double HST’s turnover
• Reduced HST’s customer-support costs, and customers’ business costs

Commenting on the current functionality of the Portal, “In addition to placing delivery orders from their own stock in our warehouses, customers can also check stock-levels, make changes, or track at real-time the movements of their goods through the various warehousing stages and processes,” says Henk Pieffers, Operations Manager, HST Transmissions

Download full case study

Time To Market: 1 Month

• A scalable and high-transaction workflow solution that supports over 100 concurrent users in processing large quantities of undeliverable post
• Over 100 distribution centers with more than 200 employees use the system and work more efficiently with flexible, role-based management reports for three different DMU levels
• Improved process of application integration using Web services, direct database connection and scheduled import

Each week Sandd receives large quantities of post that, for one reason or another is undeliverable or simply wrongly addressed. Sandds standard procedure requires the manual processing of each item, in order to provide adequate feedback to the customer and clean the recipient database at the same time as an integral part of their customer service. To keep up with growing demand, Sandd needed to streamline the daily process of receiving and administering undeliverable parcels in over 100 local distribution centers.

Download full case study