The
best approach to get business to perform as expected is to cut through all
the hype and get to the weaknesses of either business or application
processes. This in other words means benchmarking and incidentally due to
limited resources and time, benchmarking is also the one thing organisations
avoid most.
Infomet
realised the headache many businesses are stuck with and developed
the Benchmark in a box (BIB) solution to not only benchmark the business
processes but to also to analyse the business processes.
Business
might be good on the forefront but if the production systems
working in the background can not process the information efficiently and fast
enough, business will not go well on the forefront for very much longer.
Addressing these shortcomings in a production environment is not as easy as
getting the vendor in to rectify the problem. To analyse the shortcomings of a
production system there will always be at least two stakeholders involved, the
vendor and the client, each with their own agenda. The client wants a faster
production system but feels it is unfair to be expected to pay good money
again to the vendor for the same system. The vendor argues that the
specifications changed and to deliver a faster system with the current
specifications is outside the scope of the maintenance agreement between the
client and the vendor. With each stakeholder having their own agenda a classic
he said she said deadlock scenario is quickly created where neither one of the
stakeholders want to accept responsibility of the current situation. The only
effective solution to a problem like this is to involve a neutral 3rd party that
will be able to effectively analyse the problem and produce a honest, 100%
unbiased manager’s report at the end of the day that will in detail show the
flaws in the production system whether it is flaws in the client’s processes and
hardware or flaws in the vendor’s software. Just producing a detailed report is
not enough however; the vendor must be kept up to date throughout the
analysis process and should be actively engaged concerning their software
architecture in order to produce an accurate analysis of their software.
Infomet
specialises in the analysis of production systems that are
underperforming and maintains a professional distance from both the client
and the vendor to avoid alienation from either the client or the vendor. A
typical real world example was when a major retail group approached Infomet
as a neutral 3rd party to analyse the current SCM production system. The
current system was performing adequately for almost a year but because the
retail group had had such a successful business year the volume of data the
production system had to process was growing so fast the system was not
able to cope with the load anymore. Immediately the retail group blamed the
SCM software vendor expecting the vendor to rectify the problem without any
extra money being paid to the vendor. The client felt the system was barely in
production for a year so why should they pay again to fix a ‘faulty’ system. The
vendor wasn’t willing to take ownership of the problem arguing that the
system was not at fault, claiming the retail group’s processes was not optimal.
To analyse
the problem we used the Infomet methodology to analyse the
client’s current production process and the client’s current hardware setup.
We used the same methodology to analyse the vendor’s software. The Infomet
benchmark framework was used to analyse the performance of the current
production system on different hardware and with different software
configurations. With the explosion of the World Wide Web information is
limitless but in many cases not applicable to all situations and in some cases
just plain marketing hype. Infomet eliminates the speculations and rumours by
actually benchmarking the real production process by cloning the production
environment on the Infomet Benchmark in a box(BIB) server. This enables us
to produce benchmark results that is not only relevant to the unique
production environment but is also in a format the client and vendor is
familiar with. The BIB also allows us to do as much production runs as possible
without being limited by the client’s own production systems that need to
share resources. The BIB server also eliminates any marketing hype in the
business world surrounding certain hardware and software architectures by
producing hard facts relevant to the client’s unique production environment
where profiled data commonly used in standard benchmarking does not.
At the
end of the benchmarking exercise Infomet produced a manager’s report
stating all the flaws in the current system, both on the retail group’s side and
on the vendor’s side. Infomet also created a roadmap, through the
collaboration between the vendor and the retail group, which detailed the
approach each party will take to solve the inadequacies. Finally after months
of deadlocked negotiations between the retail group and the vendor there was
closure and both the retail group as well as the vendor could start working
together to create a more efficient business system.
