Software services and laptop PCs keys to efficiency

Grant Kentell, group sales manager for Auckland-based medical supply distributor Bio-Strategy, believes in using technology to boost the productivity of his nine-member sales team.

He is also a realist when it comes to assessing the potential of the latest tools of the sales trade: new-generation customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

"When I first started repping, the sales manager was the fountain of all knowledge because he was getting all of the reports and spent all day in the office analysing all of the sales figures," Kentell says. "Now [using a CRM system] anyone can look it up on the computer. Anyone can generate a report, so theoretically it's a more efficient way of doing things."

The power of a well-functioning CRM system, he says, is that it builds up invaluable records about a client's sales history and their contact with the company.

This is important for Bio-Strategy because with larger clients such as universities, the company's sales reps and product managers can have dealings with up to 200 staff at each institution.

The productivity challenge, Kentell says, is training staff to enter the required data while at the same time not having them distracted from the job of selling.

"There are good gains to be made [through CRM] - it's just how you control the data input. I don't believe in reports for reports sake or data for data's sake. I think you can get tangled up in all the fancy stuff that's in there."

Bio-Strategy recently signed up to use the services of high-profile global CRM supplier Salesforce.com.

San Francisco-based Salesforce has had a meteoric rise as the flagship promoter of the new "software as a service" business model. It sells and hosts software solutions over the web, saving customers the cost of storing and managing data themselves.

It is a model that threatens to turn the software industry on its head, and has sent giants such as Microsoft scrambling to follow suit.

The concept still has its pitfalls. Users are reliant on their internet connection and internationally, Salesforce customers have suffered disruptions to the service, although the company argues outages are lower than typical in-house company IT glitches.

Salesforce's Asia-Pacific regional vice-president of sales, Graeme Beardsell, was in New Zealand this month to announce the opening of an Auckland office.

Beardsell said that, as well as cutting IT capital costs, software as a service could be delivered into a business much faster than the traditional means of installing applications throughout an organisation, and that resulted in productivity gains.

The software-as-a-service revolution is an example of the industry adapting to keep itself relevant to jaded customers fed up with underperforming, bug-riddled applications.

Garth Biggs, executive director of the Government's HiGrowth Project, says more of this type of lateral thinking is required to boost the information and communications technology sector and improve overall business productivity.

Major hardware and software companies all told the Business Herald that New Zealand firms are generally willing to spend on technology when given a business case showing it the investment will boost workforce productivity.

That may be news to tens of thousands of office workers forced to endure old lumbering crash-prone PCs and office networks.

But Brett Hannath, regional customer solutions group manager for microprocessor giant Intel, says smart businesses realise technology can give them a competitive edge in the market.

"If you take a financial institution for example, the ability to send an employee out with a mobile device and process a home loan there on the spot, upload it immediately and get an approval immediately is an obvious competitive edge over 'fill in this form and you'll have an answer in a week'."

A key focus for businesses looking to make their staff more productive is shifting them from desktop computers to laptops.

Research company IDC says New Zealand laptop sales leapt 20.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2006 compared with the same period last year, while desktop PC sales were down 14.8 per cent.

Dell country manager Derek Leitch says the productivity gains from wider use of laptops are not simply about getting already hard-working staff to work even longer hours: it is about using mobility to enable them to work smarter and more efficiently.

More staff are spending time working from home, enjoying the benefits of fewer interruptions and a more productive environment, Leitch says.

The surge in laptop usage is also driving growth in certain segments of the software market.

IDC analyst Ullirich Loeffler says while New Zealand has been slower to register growth in the type of CRM applications being used by Bio-Strategy, they are now in high demand. IDC predicts local CRM sales - driven by demand for salesforce automation tools - will grow by more than 12 per cent a year until 2010.

But some workers, by the nature of their job, remain stuck behind a desk. Dell's Leitch says businesses are also getting smarter about boosting productivity around fixed machines.

He says one Dell client in the engineering and consulting industry has boosted the productivity of its design staff by 40 per cent as a result of upgrading computers from standard PCs to ones designed specifically for the tasks the staff are performing.

IBM's national manager responsible for workplace, Peter Neal, says installing inter-office communication and online collaboration tools is another effective way to boost productivity.

An application such as IBM's Sametime, which indicates when staff are at their desk and facilitates instant messaging across the network, offers big productivity gains across a large organisation by reducing time wasted playing phone tag or travelling to meetings, he says.

"It's a fairly easy return on investment. I've recently come up with examples where it's [paid for itself] within six to 12 months."

The chase for the latest, most efficient technology can lead to frustration for businesses when basic infrastructure such as broadband goes down unexpectedly.

But technology can also be a hedge against the failure of basic services, as Intel's Hannath discovered last week when the lights went out in Auckland as he was about to give a presentation.

Because of Intel's policy of equipping all staff with laptops, several were passed around the room and the PowerPoint presentation began with the audience huddled around the small screens.

"That gave us business continuity and flexibility, if you like," he says.

THE SERIES

Connect@Work is investigating New Zealand's lagging economic productivity with a month-long series looking at how businesses can improve through better investment in and use of information and communications technology.

Two weeks ago
The macro-economic issue - where NZ stands among its peers, and what is the best way forward.

Last week
*Leveraging the internet - why businesses have thus far failed to transform themselves, and how they can use online capabilities to change into leaner and meaner operations.

Today
*Hardware and software - why businesses are going for the cheapest option, or not using their existing technology to its full advantage.

Next week
*Communications - how voice-over internet protocol and video conferencing can save time and resources.