Automate Your Clients' Projects

In business, as in so many areas of life, it's not often necessary to re-invent the wheel. When a client comes to you with a business problem, you must of course formulate a unique solution. But you can automate your solutions somewhat, both by presenting solutions in a standardized format and by giving examples of solutions used by other businesses.

Enterprise software supplier SAP agrees; so much so that they've made this sort of learning-by-example part of their business plan. They use the experiences gained from implementations at major firms like IBM and Compaq to pre-configure enterprise software systems for other clients.

"I liken it to this: if you were going to buy a home, you have a couple of options," says SAP Senior VP Allen Brault. "You can talk to an architect and discuss design characteristics, wants and needs. Then the architect can go off and develop things for you and deliver some blueprints to you. As a buyer of a home, you also have the opportunity to look at existing plans and blueprints or even look at prefabricated homes."

The Methodology of Presentation

The first step in automating client solutions is developing a methodology, or SOP. You might even call it a recipe. The ingredients may differ, but you'd always present them in the same format.

"You have to have a methodology in terms of how you collect data, how you package data, and more importantly how you continually maintain that data," says Brault. "The benefit to the new customers and new prospects in this area is that they can accelerate their implementation times and lower their cost of implementation at the same time as inheriting best business practices that have been commonly brought together from companies around the world."

Your client could be in computing, in transportation, in dentistry. That wouldn't matter. What would matter is the information you'd give to each client would look much the same on the surface.

"For several years now, SAP has used a standard communication vehicle for disseminating that type of information to new customers, prospects and existing customers that want to extend their existing blueprints. Those are called industry blueprints or process maps. They go by industry and will articulate a specific given business process that's been tailored for that given industry," he says.

"Businesses can then look at this and say that this business process will work, or it needs to be tweaked somewhere along the line, to either add this nuance or subtract that one."

"Say you're a high tech manufacturer and you may have a build-to- order process, for example. You may need to support that. If you have a company that builds PCs over the Internet, through mail order or on the phone, you have to have the capability of a business process to handle a build-to-order. That makes sense to the industry and to the company that's doing that," says Brault.

Automation = Cost Savings

The best part about automating your problem solving methodology is that as you get more experienced at doing it, your costs go down. SAP, for instance, configures their software packages by industry. If you work in a particular industry and you're considering SAP, you can examine the choices businesses similar to yours have made.

"For example, one of our best business practices is the service provider. This is a best business practice pre-configuration solution that is targeted towards service companies, consulting companies, and anyone in the service industry," says Brault. "We have a couple of partners that have taken that and then built further defined configuration on top of that: one for ASP (application service providers) and ISPs (Internet service providers). When you get down to that unique level of business, there may be little nuances that bring you closer to a 100% fit for that customer. The goal is to reduce the cost, the implementation time, and enhance the benefit of best business practices for the customer."

Unique problems require unique solutions. But automating those solutions - now that's a solution that makes sense for your clients, and for your business.