To manage costs in trying times - A CFO's perspective.

Managing costs is always one of the key objectives for a CFO of any organization. But these are the times where it is more relevant than ever. In this article I would share my experiences in cost management, which could be of use to you too.

Nowadays to run a business efficiently we are increasingly depending on Information technology. While Information technology has helped us to provide a high quality of service to the customers at the speed of thought, it has always come with the high price tag, which has been not affordable for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME).

The bulk of the cost spent on the Information Technology is usually spent on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. Most of the ERP applications besides being expensive, involve plenty of customization efforts, which add further to the expense.

As a CFO, I was interested in looking for low cost enterprise management software that can be used by my organizations which employs 120 people in two different countries. Specifically I was looking for affordable enterprise management software that had the following major attributes:

Scalability
Interoperability
Customization
Reliability
Ease of use & Deployment
Security
Great value for money
Good after sales support

I was not willing to compromise on any of the above-mentioned features when I began my search for ERP applications. As like any other finance person I had allocated a budget, which I could spend on the software. My Budget was under USD 10,000. With this budget I was trying to find a suitable enterprise wide applications, which can be used, by my project managers, customer support executives, marketing personnel, HR & Administrative staff and the production personnel in our organization.

I could realize very quickly that I needed to either reduce my expectations on the software or increase my allocated budget by several folds. None of the bigger brands could offer a solution any where near the budget I was having. Some of the software, which was within the budget, had problems when it came to meeting my major objective of scalability and customization.

Luckily I ran into SmartWorks, which claimed to do what I was looking for, and appeared to be well within the budget. I started looking at it seriously and wanted to evaluate it against some of the major attributes I had wanted in an ERP and see how it measures up.

Scalability

My Rating: Great

This was one of the key attributes I was looking for. I was looking for the software to scale up/down with the size of my organization. Considering the size of my organization it was clear to me that I have to choose between Smartworks-Professional version or Smartworks-Enterprise version. I decided to choose on Smartworks Enterprise, as it did not have any upper limit on the number of users who could use the
software while the Smartworks-Professional could support only up to fifty users.

If the size of my organization was around fifty I would have chosen the professional edition as it would have saved me around 1000 US dollars. Smartworks came with two-default plug-ins.

The first plug-in called Project Planner is targeted at Project managers, leaders and the design and development folks in my organization. This was enterprise wide project management software and at any point of time managers knew about the real time status of the various activities in multiple projects, which they have been managing. It had some neat features for me as well. I could see how well each of the projects was doing in terms of costs.

The other plug in was Smart tracker, which allowed us to track practically anything and everything, which we do in our concern. I tried my hands at it and customized it to track all the purchases we make for the concern. I should admit it was not as easy to do the customization, as I would have liked. But some one said there was a tutor for me to have a look at for the smart tracker and it sure did help me to do what I wanted. Soon I saw people using this plug in to track defects in their products, customer complaints and sales leads. I discovered smart tracker allowed us to track whatever we wanted. I figured with little bit of discipline one could track almost anything.

Interoperability

My Rating: Good

It is one thing to have the software do what you want while it is a completely different things if you were to share the data with your customers or partners who may not have this software. It was important for me to ensure that the data which we track using Smartworks can be made available to our customers with little or no effort.

Smartworks gave me an option to export my data (and import as well) to an Excel file. This was great as I spend most of the time playing with the excel file. Besides it allowed me to export data in something called XML format. I was curious to know what it was and was told by one of the technical persons that it was a universal data format, which the software vendors have been agreeing for a while. I am not sure whether I would use this format but it did make me feel comfortable to know that Smartworks seem to talk this universal language.

Besides I also could generate and publish the data in web (HTML) format. I guess I should be OK with all these things. But one of the technical persons was curious to know whether the data can be stored in databases such as Access, Oracle or SQL server.
I just checked with the Smartworks people and found out that they supported something called ODBC, which allowed them to store the application data in any one of the industry standard databases. But they had a catch. They wanted me to buy a software component called ODBC driver from them to support it. I went back to the technical person and asked him whether we should buy this. Based on his advice (exporting your data in XML is good enough.) I decided not to buy this. In case if it turns out to be a bad decision, I wound go ahead and buy the ODBC component when the situation demands.

Customization

My Rating: Can Improve

It was essential for me not to hire a bunch of programmers to ensure that my enterprise application is up and running. I preferred a level of customization, which can be done easily by a novice user. Smartworks met this criterion. However I felt they could make the customization even easier. While it is true that i did not need the help of programmers for customizing some of my projects (for tracking travel requests and
assets) it was not easy either. I think this is one area where they could improve. In fact i now have some ideas for having new plug-ins tailored to my requirement to be incorporated in Smartworks for maintaining asset register and handling inventory for a software concern.

Reliability

My Rating: Great

I have heard horror stories about the lack of reliability in using unbranded software. It was important that the software runs without crashing forever. This is one thing I would never compromise. To my relief I have never faced any problems with the Smartworks so far, even though we have been running this for the past one and a half years. Touch wood!

Ease of use& Deployment

My Rating: Average

The SmartWorks software has two major components. We have the server and the plug-ins, which are the clients. Installing the server and clients were no problems at all. One major issue which our IT administrator worried about was in upgrading the clients on all the nodes in the network whenever a new upgrade for the client is available. Turns out that the Smartworks people have come up with a mechanism for auto upgrades. Our IT staff installs the plug-ins only once and the nodes automatically pull the new upgrades. This has certainly made life easier for our help desk people.

I did not find the usage difficult. But I should admit that I browsed through the tutors, which they have for smart tracker and project planner.

Security

My Rating: Good

Security is of paramount importance in any application, which has data concerning HR and Finance. Smartworks provides different levels of security for each project it maintains. For instance a highly secure project would list only reports related to you and whenever some one tries to login using your name by guessing your password you get an intruder alert message. In addition you might ensure that users can log in only from specified their seats by explicitly associating IP address with the login user. There is also a facility for the project managers to deny access to administrator for projects. This to a great extent ensures that the confidential information, which we want to stay confidential, remains so.

Great value for money

My Rating: Fantastic

The purchase cost of Smartworks for the whole enterprise was USD 3000. This included Project Planner and Smart tracker the most often used plug-ins at Accord. In addition we bought all the other enterprise editions Meeting manager, Net man, HR plug-ins (Suggestion box and leave planner) at a price of USD 2,000.

So roughly the total investment we have made on Smartworks is around USD 5000. This has worked out to be around 40 USD per employee in our organization. Our employees use the software to plan and track all the project activities, Apply leaves, Give valuable suggestions to the management, perform helpdesk related activities and perform software asset management. In addition the Netman communicator has virtually replace E-mail for all our instant communication needs. Considering what we get out Smartworks I would say we have had a very good bargain.

Good after sales

My Rating: Ok

Smartworks comes with a free support for the first 3 months. The support is done through E-mail. If you are Enterprise customers, then by paying an annual maintenance contract fee of USD 2,000 every year you get all the new upgrades as and when they are released every year. But they give only E-mail support. Sometimes it may be handy to have telephone support. They should consider providing these supports in future. The email support works really well. We get most answers within one business day.
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This article is written by Mr.Manoharan, who is the CFO for Accord Software & Systems Pvt Ltd. mail him at http://www.smartworks.us/htm/feedback.htm. Author is CFO of Accord software and systems, which is a medium scale company with more than 250 employees and offices in US and India. Here he explains how he decided SmartWorks as a right choice for his organization to improve productivity.