Making the Leap
to SBS2003
THE CHALLENGE
To improve responsiveness to customers while simplifying administration,
Premier Exteriors’ general manager, Phil Maxstadt, decided
to invest in the company’s first server.
While the particular mission of Premier is working with homeowners,
builders and developers on residential exteriors, gutters, windows,
doors and siding, Maxstadt admits the company’s core competency
is really project management.
“Making our business work is about getting the right people
the right information so they can do the right thing at the right
time,” Maxstadt said. “It is a complex dance and we’ve
gotten very good at it.
“Our competitive edge is doing things faster and better than
our competitors. Sometimes the right information comes from our
vendors and other times it comes from our staff or the sales force.
Wherever it comes from, I knew that a three-person administrative
staff sharing two PCs in order to oversee 40 crew members just wasn’t
going to work.”
FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN
Maxstadt’s business needed to evolve past its reliance on
paper-driven systems and the unproductive process of ‘phone
tag.’ Although he’d never managed a new server project
before, Maxstadt wouldn’t let fear of the unknown stop his
progress. He knew he couldn’t grow his business when his staff
outnumbered the office’s computer resources.
“We revamped our web presence before upgrading our network,”
Maxstadt said. “When you set-up a website, you invite people
to reach out to you electronically. When your customers can reach
you immediately, their expectations change. They want a response
NOW. Seeing prospects and customers take advantage of the website
confirmed that we were on the right track.”
According to Maxstadt, sales proposal volume noticeably increased
and a dedicated sales executive was hired to absorb the new workload.
“With more leads, more suppliers and more subcontractors performing
more work, we needed better information throughout the day, as events
occur, not just when staff can be reached by phone.”
Maxstadt’s biggest concern was to get his company on the
right technology path, while also making the upgrade work within
his very limited budget. In late 2004, Premier Exteriors made the
leap, acquired several new PC’s and installed them in a peer-to-peer
network. Then Maxstadt began planning for the inevitable next step.
KEY ISSUES
According to Robert Hamilton (techtangle.com), the business consultant
hired by Premier Exteriors to assist the conversion to server-based
computing, any server product requires regular care and maintenance
-- there is no product on the market that you can just turn on and
abandon.
Hamilton and Premier Exteriors selected Small Business Server 2003
from Microsoft because it includes a number of important features
for small business; including e-mail, fax, database, collaboration,
back-up and security – all in one package with a simplified,
wizard driven set-up and management via single console.
“Big companies have entire departments that manage these
kinds of solutions,” Hamilton said. “At $599 (MSRP)
SBS2003 –is a new high-water mark for small businesses that
want to improve collaboration thanks to the tight integration of
Exchange 2003, SharePoint and Outlook. All that said, though, SBS2003
is more than just an operating system upgrade, and you need more
than just a basic understanding of networks to make it work.”
While the decision to use SBS2003 was simple, the most important
step of any SBS2003 implementation is understanding and preserving
a company’s sacred cows. “SBS2003 is a powerful set
of enterprise tools re-engineered for small businesses.”
Hamilton advises anyone considering SBS2003 to take the time to
determine which features are must-haves that need to be activated
immediately and which are nice-to-haves that can be brought up after
the users have completed an initial orientation process.
The opportunities for streamlining workflow through the office
to the desktops and outside are numerous, and every company’s
culture absorbs change at a different rate. “The last thing
you want to do is to re-engineer the core workflows to such a degree
that hardly any employee can follow it, or document it,” advises
Hamilton. “Especially with small businesses, where routines
are sometimes entrenched, knocking over the sacred cows all at once
can be disorienting.”
DETERMINING ROI BY ELIMINATING COMPLEXITY
The move to server-based networking enabled Premier Exteriors to
achieve better management of customer-related information. Premier
also automated key record keeping (and in the process improved responsiveness
to customers, without increasing staff).
According to Hamilton, “What Phil (Maxstadt) needed is a reliable
way to reduce reliance on ad-hoc interactions among people on any
given project. There will always be ad-hoc communication but gambling
that critical information gets communicated properly is dangerous,
especially as you increase the number of active projects. Mistakes
mean re-work and I know that Phil hates rework more than anything.”
“So many people fixate on the technology instead of the process
the technology improves,” Maxstadt said. “What we wanted
and what we accomplished was just a better way to work together.
Putting a dollar amount on these things is difficult to do. Over
time, we expect to see a reduction in rework and customer service
issues. What we wanted to accomplish, beyond the need to perform
more work, more reliably, with the same resources, is the need to
free people from as much drudge-work as possible. It is easier to
keep your staff motivated if you can minimize the ‘adminis-trivia’
that needs to be done manually – if you can automate the dull
tasks, you can spend more quality time on customer issues.”
Maxstadt knows his staff is getting more done in the same amount
of time. “But I don’t think ROI is the right way to
describe the efficiencies we’re gaining,” he said. “The
things were doing now are an order of magnitude beyond faster/cheaper.
Since we’ve never experienced shared calendars and bid documentation
accessible from anywhere, it is hard to put a specific dollar value
on these things.”
“This is not about technology. This is about our ability
to rapidly create and collaborate on documents. This is really a
better way to manage projects: rapidly understand the opportunity,
gather the relevant info and agree on the details of a proposal
and send it to a prospective client. With all these moving parts,
shortening the time on all those cycles was essential to increase
our share of bids “won” and in enabling our team to
create better quality bids that are delivered faster.”
Maxstadt reasons that the company is now bidding on five more projects
each week with no increase in staff.
Maxstadt claims he worried about adding technical complexity and
candidly comments that complexity in any business can be bad. “We’re
not in the business of making sure our network technology works.
Our customers don’t care about our network, or server, or
intranet. When you’re still doing things manually and thinking
about collaboration, it all seems overwhelming. But what I have
discovered that my team now has greater clarity around what we need
to do to deliver what our customers need. As far as I’m concerned,
the complexity has been absorbed by the technology, where it belongs,
freeing people to be able to think smarter about our customers.
By adding SBS, we’ve actually reduced complexity.”
SIDEBAR:
SIDEBAR:
GOTCHAS
According to Robert Hamilton (www.techtangle.com), the consultant
hired by Premier Exteriors to manage their network, here are some
of the Small Business Server “gotchas” you should understand
if you’re thinking about SBS for your business…
1) Regular care and feeding. No matter what anyone tells you, Small
Business Server requires some regular care and feeding. Because
there are so many server functions inside the SBS package, monitoring
and reporting is something you need to stay on top of. It does an
excellent job of revealing open issues, and configuration problems,
but it is not something you can just turn-on and abandon.
2) Smooth set-up more likely in consistent environment. The fact
that all our machines were XP sp2 greatly simplified the entire
process.
3) It’s not as easy as Microsoft claims – but it is
close. You need more than a basic understanding of networks to make
it work, especially if you are integrating it into a functioning
network infrastructure and migrating users/settings/files/profiles
4) Watch feature creep. SBS has so many great features it is easy
to be seduced by all the possibilities. Have a plan for introducing
new features to your employees. Too many new features too fast can
quickly become overwhelming.
5) Watch the wiring. If you’re in an old building, make sure
that new wiring is anticipated in your budget.
Ben Bradley is the managing director of GrowingCo, Inc. and The
Bradley Group. Do you have a question or topic you would like Ben
to address in an upcoming column? Please send your comments to ben@benbradley.net.
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