Tag: Product Development

  • Using Middleware to Eliminate a FTE as a Product Manager

    Using Middleware to Eliminate a FTE as a Product Manager

    Sometimes a simple product improvement can lead to dramatic changes in business processes and personnel changes. This is a story about how custom middleware eliminated a FTE.

    At Skinny & Co., as a product manager, one of the products I managed was Fishbowl Inventory (along with the processes and technologies that were involved and integrated with it).

    Fishbowl Inventory was not web-based at the time, it was on-premise software running on a local server. It had file import and export capabilities, but no web-based API.

    Many of our wholesale orders came in through a web portal called Brandwise, which had a file export system where orders could be exported via PDF or as CSV files.

    It was one person’s full-time job to download orders from Brandwise and import them into Fishbowl. They typically did this via the PDF by manually typing the information into Fishbowl.

    When Processes Don’t Work

    One of the first things I did to improve this process was to train the person how to use the CSV imports from Brandwise to import the order information into Fishbowl.

    Fishbowl had a slightly different format so the order manager had to learn how to reformat the CSV file into a format that Fishbowl could accept, and then clean up any errors.

    One type of error was in the name of the customer. If the name was different in any way, Fishbowl would create a new customer record for it, creating duplicates and forking their order history.

    The other issue was that sometimes customers still used old SKUs which wouldn’t translate or import into the system. And a downfall of Fishbowl is that if any information was wrong, none of it imported.

    The order manager reasoned that the amount of time it took to do that was not worth the effort and thus they went back to manually inputting the orders from the PDFs.

    Custom Middleware

    At that point I then set about to fix the file conversion problem to make it easy for someone to be able to input a file from Brandwise to Fishbowl in the correct format without creating duplicate customer records or stopping due to a bad SKU.

    I worked with a development team to write up the use case and then test the results. We developed a system which included:

    • software on the Fishbowl server that synced the customer and product data up to the middleware web server and allowed information to be written back
    • a web interface which allowed the user to import the order file from Brandwise, search and map customer records (if exact match not found), and to search and map SKUs (if exact match not found)

    This process prevented the imports from creating duplicate customer records or failing to import due to a bad SKU.

    And while it had upfront development costs and added a new, monthly hosting fee, it allowed us to eliminate a FTE.

    Later this system was replaced with a more robust, but less custom system from Synqware. Formerly with Bizperanto, Synqware is now part of Celerant.

  • Don’t Change. Profit.

    Why are people so interested in the new(s)? Because they hate change. Here’s how to capitalize on that fear:

    I recently wrote about how people don’t like to change and it got me thinking, “What if I created products or services based on the premise that people hate change?” Tablet computers are revolutionary partly because they don’t have a keyboard, but one of the most popular accessories for a tablet computer is a keyboard. This is because people are used to computers having physical keyboards and they hate learning something new. Incandescent light bulbs are going to soon become illegal and people will be forced to buy fluorescent or LED light bulbs instead. People hate this and will now pay a premium for the regular old incandescent light bulbs. Nintendo releases the Wii 2, the most advanced gaming system yet, but people are still clamoring for games and accessories for the NES. It’s not retro – it’s change rejection.

    Call it whatever you like, there is money to be had in working against the onslaught of new products. Solo or one-cup coffee makers like the Keurig and their K-Cup system is now all the rage, which means there could be a market for the standard, large coffee pots you grew up with. Ebook readers and ebooks are now sold more on Amazon than traditional paper books. This could mean there is an opportunity for well-designed paper books to make a comeback. Ten years ago, in the height of the CD era, vinyl was cool. Now cassette tapes are coming back into style. Whatever is normal can become cool when change comes around. Digital wallets that use your phone to store credit and debit card information will soon replace your regular wallet, which means regular wallets will start to become cooler than ever. (more…)