



I write about various topics but ERP and business software suites from the angle of product management or product development, are the main subjects.





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.
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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.
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:
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
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