ERP

Enterprise Resource Management

LMS

Learning Management System

CRM

Customer Relationship Management

Data Centers

Small Business to Commercial

Contact Centers

Evolution

VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol

Enterprise Resource Management

Microsoft Dynamics

I have implemented MSD for two companies with revenue over $170 million. Both were in sizable rebuilding phase. People and systems were being replaced to achieve more efficiency and higher profitability. 

SAP

I have rolled out SAP for four companies, typically as a steppingstone for medium sized businesses to get a handle on huge increases in revenue and resource planning on a new level. Since an ERP is a tool for finance, accounting and leadership, implementations were simpler and much smoother than implementations that included all staff and computers.

Lawson Financials

I have deployed Lawson for companies with $70 million to $105 million in revenue. Implementations went well but there were issues with software updates causing outages over several years. There were a few compatibility issues with Oracle for a particularly complex instance. Ultimately, we converted Oracle to Microsoft SQL to resolve the issues.

NetSuite

I have rolled out NetSuite for four companies, and when Finance has a very strong influence in selecting a new ERP, my experience is that NetSuite is the solution that wins. My companies love the real-time view into the data, and the ability to manage other areas of the business beyond finance to include sales, supply chain, among others. One of the primary considerations in every major software purchase is how fast it can scale with the business. I have never seen any issue with growth, even several years and more than $150 million + in growth.

Customer Relationship Management

SalesForce

I have managed SalesForce implementations many times, as well as overhauling large instances already in place at with 4,000+ employees and $4 billion in revenue.

In the early days of SalesForce, APIs were an obstacle to overcome, largely due to companies storing customer and sales data in homemade systems. Exporting large data sets, reformatting them once or twice, then importing them into a new SalesForce instance was time- or cost-prohibitive. SalesForce Data Loader overcomes many of those challenges and it is free.

HubSpot

I have managed two rollouts of HubSpot. Both were for companies with under 1000 employees and $45 million in revenue. This was the easiest to roll out with a smaller learning curve for salespeople, most of whom had had bad experiences acclimating to CRMs with other companies.

Goldmine

It has been a few years since I deployed Goldmine. It was one of the first CRMs affordable for small to medium sized businesses. Because it was better than sharing Excel spreadsheets, acceptance by staff was very high. Transitions from Goldmine to SalesForce were sometimes problematic due to the latter’s virtually limitless feature set overwhelming the customer, and the refusal of sales staff to give up on Goldmine because it still worked on some level. 

Learning Management Systems

ELB

I implemented ELB to a dispersed workforce requiring diverse learning objectives based on job type.  The system was reliable and populated with hundreds of custom courses. The move from Lessonly took 5 months to meet our schedules.

ELB, formerly E-Learning Brothers, is a great solution. It would be difficult to find an option they do not offer. It can be more than overwhelming to set up and use, even for experienced staff. worked remotely, and Their knowledge base left much to desire. 

I created a request for proposal (RFP) program that elicited responses from more than 20 vendors.

Lessonly

Lessonly had been in place for several years when I joined the company, and it was used infrequently. Instructing and mentoring staff on content creation, topic development and reporting. In 2021, Seismic purchased Lessonly which resulted in a lack of focus on building new features, chief among them was becoming SCORM compliant. Lessonly had been in place for several years when I joined the company, and it was used infrequently. Instructing and mentoring staff on content creation, topic development and reporting. In 2021, Seismic purchased Lessonly which resulted in a lack of focus on building new features, chief among them was becoming SCORM compliant. 

Other Systems: Moodle, Canvas, Open edX.

There was a trend of large companies building their own education systems because they were convinced by someone, usually internally, that no commercial system  in existence could possible meet all of their nuanced requirements. That might have been true a long time ago but it would be highly unlikely today. That trend is coming to an end. 

Data Centers

I want to be clear, I am not a licensed electrician, plumber, HVAC installer, building inspector, fire marshal, architect, or structural engineer. People in those fields are amazing and spend years of education and training to qualify for their certifications and titles. I am grateful to many of them for collaborating with me to create high quality solutions. 

I use the term “build” in the sense that I draw the data center to scale for my requirements and populate it with every detail. I then collaborate with a team of contractors who apply their expertise to install according to regional building code requirements. I design cable plant installation. I determine current and forecast future power needs of the data center, and for new buildings I provide the same for office and storage space. I am typically responsible for determining which utility companies to work with (when there is a choice) and ensure that each has a unique ingress into the building. I determine UPS and generator needs and set up long-term contracts for maintenance and refueling. I set up the redundant paths for electricity, data cabling, Internet, and HVAC to the cabinet level. 

The impetus for taking on data center design came from proposals from outside vendors to perform all the work. To save money, over time I came to take over all parts of the process except professional service, which typically cut costs by 55%.

Companies using the data center have exacting needs and strict timelines with millions of dollars at stake. It cannot be handed off to amateurs. Working in data centers since the early 1990s, I learned about HVAC, fire suppression, power, and physical security. I combined that with my expertise voice and data network configurations, business continuity and disaster recovery, and a tremendous amount of research. To date, I have built data centers in sizes from 400 to 12,000 square feet. 

Contact Centers

Contact centers have changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Once called call centers for the simple reason that support revolved around the telephone. Agents did not have access to email or the Internet. Call centers evolved and added email, then online chat. Voice over IP (VoIP) brought the virtual end of dedicated voice circuits which brought telecom costs down, followed by artificial intelligence (AI). In the beginning, a human could manage one call at a time. Today, they can manage a call and a few chats simultaneously. AI can manage any number of chat sessions, limited only by the amount of bandwidth and computing power available. 

In 2023, thanks to AI and modern computing power, human-quality voice interaction became common for large companies which can perform deeply complex calculations and interact with any enterprise system and the Internet at the speed of light, finding answers faster than a human could say “how can I help you today?” Add to those interactive FAQs, how-to videos, and virtual simulations, and the need for humans taking calls decreases significantly. 
A contact center today may have no human agents at all, but that will not be universal for several years. For example, a nurse at the south pole will not trust a robot to walk them through a medical procedure on a video call, and neither will healthcare laws in most countries. Such situations lie outside of our comfort zone with AI. I have been on the front line of contact centers for 30 years, and I know how to get the right solution in place for any business. In several cases, I have led the technology push to build new or integrate existing solutions in the voice market.

VoIP

What it is:

What it is: Voice over Internet Protocol, or telephone calls over the Internet.

Around 1995, the Internet got big enough and fast enough to keep up with a network to process the amount of information required. It was a huge deal because phone calls to and from anywhere in the world could bypass long distance lines and costs. It upended the big phone companies and revolutionized the telecom industry .

I was fortunate to start my IT career in Telecom and be heavily involved with bringing virtually free calls to my employer from offices all over the world. In the beginning of that revolution, the same companies that had built commercial voice systems built specialized hardware, deliberately incompatible with competitor’s hardware, that would encrypt and decrypt voice packets. My team was the first in the world to set up a transoceanic VoIP network using disparate hardware from two major vendors. 30 years in, it seems like a small feat, but it taught me how to manage technology change on a global scale. Today’s network hardware is brand agnostic and data transits networks without dedicated hardware.

Back to Top