Innovation, Revolution, and Democracy
There is a defining moment in every business where they either decide to get in line with the rest of the herd or move in an entirely new direction. I find that being a part of a startup causes you to make that decision on nearly a daily basis.
The current problem with American manufacturing is that overseas competition has made it more difficult to match pricing, speed, and quality. Mainly because the incumbent enterprise giants have fallen into slow moving lazy river populated by other fat and bloated US competitors.
Real innovation and real revolution has always come from entrepreneurs in the small to medium-sized manufacturing market. But sustaining any significant growth year after year becomes difficult without the right processes, automation tools, and intelligent data to guide them toward opportunities, instead of reacting to trends and obstacles.
What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
Using intelligent customer demand-driven data to execute business decisions is the benchmark for next generation manufacturing companies to compete in today’s market.
But what small to medium-size company could ever afford the massive financial and technology investment demanded by incumbent software giants like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM?
We started InCloud Control to equip manufacturing companies of any size to compete on a global stage, by democratizing software-based business execution tools, often called ERP software.
And when I say we are democratizing the product I mean it in the most literal sense. Ruled by the people, not the elite. From the pricing model established by customer voting, to product roadmap established by customer voting, we intend to give this unreached market a new and powerful voice in the business execution software space.
How do we intend to accomplish this ambitious goal?
Well, we started from day one by realizing companies in our market focus size wouldn’t, couldn’t and didn’t need or use every feature and function packed into a complex ERP system. So we started asking companies what was important to them. We focused on controls around the feedback we got that pointed to cost controls, production capacity, and quality.
And from there we found it a whole lot easier to create a user interface that was easy to learn, delivered a ton of valuable insight from just three points of order data (Finished Product, Quantity, and Delivery Deadline), and was easy to configure for each unique company process workflow. InCloud MX (for manufacturing execution) is our flagship launch product and is going to focus on the feedback we received from excited manufacturing companies wanting to know the answers to these six questions:
1. What are my costs for this specific order?
2. How will this order impact my production schedule?
3. What staff and machine resources will be required to fulfill this order?
4. What materials will be required when this order is produced?
5. What production asset maintenance needs to be scheduled?
6. And what is the real time progress of every order?
And by delivering our first product to simply answer those 6 questions our focus groups were able to breath a collective sigh of relief. We heard things like;
“I believe anyone in my company will be able to learn and like to use this software. It’s so easy.”
“We actually could use everything available in this software.”
“Having a vote in what goes into the product, and then seeing it there the next week was unreal.”
“What this software does is all we really needed to be more profitable and ultimately better serve our customers.”
So how can you keep up with the constant demand for product enhancements?
First off – Mx is a “framework” not a “product”
The whole application is built on top of the InCloud Control Business Execution Framework – which was built from the ground up to enable rapid implementation of new features and even entirely new applications. Everything in the framework is a service – and existing or new applications can easily consume these services to extend their feature set.
Following a classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) software design pattern – data concerns are completely abstracted from control and presentation. With just a few lines of code we can add a front-end feature or a new back-end service.
By listening to our customers we realized that we needed a fully de-coupled execution system – companies can start with a single operation – using just one module – and convert more operations and add more users over time. As their needs evolve they can adopt new modules. They pay only for what they need and more importantly, only for what they use.
Along with the simplicity of the modules available we needed an interface created from day one with usability in mind – this speeds up deployments and makes user training go swiftly. Successful adoption of new technologies hinges on user excitement: simply put, we don’t believe it’s being done right unless users rave about the impact we’ve had on their job.
To answer the question of continuous development, an easily customized set of tools was required – modularity is the fundamental concept of this system and we can add new features quickly and easily. Moreover, most process customizations are achieved with configuration alone, not code. Thanks to this we can, or the customer can, easily adjust the system to their specific needs and situation.
Finally, to address the concerns of IT overhead and technology complexities associated with traditional business execution software deployments, we decided to make our software only available as a service (SaaS) – InCloud Control Mx is available for almost any browser and eliminates the need for customers to install software or maintain a complex infrastructure. We eliminate technology concerns like backups and system upgrades; we’re handling that all behind the scenes for the customer.
So how do you plan to democratize the pricing model?
How else would a company “ruled by the people” decide? How ‘bout with a vote by our focus customer group? Yep, that’s what we did. We asked our potential customers, “now that you’ve tried the software, like the software, like our people, and are seeing real value in the using InCloud Mx – what would you pay – no what could you pay?” And like an empowered community with a voice, they told us.
Not only did they tell us how they like to buy software, but they shared the ways that absolutely drove them nuts about long-term, nickel and dime pricing models, and contracts that lock them into a resentful relationship with the vendor from day one.
We listened and created a pricing model that exemplifies our corporate philosophy of livening out the picture of extreme generosity – a never-ending pursuit of Customer Ecstasy that overflows into the communities where our customers live.
InCloud Mx will be sold in packs of 10 users for $99 per month – Period.
There was one other important piece of knowledge we gathered during our focus group phase of developing the product and business model – many of our target market clients struggle with documenting, governing, executing, and ultimately automating their processes. This led us to discuss a low-cost high-value engagement that would drive time-to-value for companies wanting to improve in this area. Once again we presented options to our customers and put it to a vote. The result was that the customers felt that up to 5 days would be the maximum they could commit to an engagement, but that 2-3 days was much more manageable – specially, if we split the engagement into a 2 day discovery and then returned at the end of the week with our results and deliverables meeting. That they could do. That they would pay for.
It makes sense to ask your customers what they want.
Oh, and by the way, they voted on the name of the engagement and came up with Kick Start. We liked it and who were we to argue. As a paid engagement to help evaluate the process maturity and then be able to deliver that to customers in three days is worth years of system development – but our customers decided that $6000.00 was a price they would pay and could pay. Yes, that price was voted upon as well.
High-touch software businesses are a rare occurrence. Our customer’s thought it would be outstanding if the same person that performed the Kick Start could then transition into their direct contact for support. Great idea! They decided to call that person the “Customer Advocate”.
How do you plan to sell this into a market that is mostly operating in a very manual way?
Direct sales come from our Customer Advocates because they have become immersed in both the best utilization of the InCloud Mx platform and the end-to-end business processes of the customer. As discussed before – we can begin each engagement with a “kick start” that helps companies identify the problems that keep them from improving and growing.
As our organization grows – the manual process of onboarding customers will become more streamlined and automated using simple web-forms and guided interviews (aka “Wizards”) to help organizations quickly build their customized platform and import their existing data. Once these on-ramps are in place, we will begin to roll out a channel strategy for national reach that leverages trusted consultants, with the required industry knowledge and expertise, to be our face to the customer.
InCloud Control has modeled our strategy around industry organizations like the Center of Innovation for Manufacturing, ATDC, Next Generation Manufacturing, TAG Manufacturing networking, and the engineering power provided by a close relationship with Georgia Tech and their Factory Information Systems (FIS) Group.
Leadership and guidance from these groups is providing an outstanding pedestal to share our story and we thank each individual that has warmly welcomed us into the Georgia innovation and manufacturing culture.
We hope you find our vision for democratizing business execution software just a bit crazy, because that’s exactly what we were hoping to accomplish.
The bottom line is our competitors are going to hate us, but our customers are going to fricken love us!
Connect with us at www.myinlcloud.com and tell us what you think. Better yet, let us setup a live demo for you to see what all the fuss is about.
Viva La InCloud!