Shuffle Master, a casino equipment maker, found a quick way to get more from its customer relationship management and planning systems—and avoid a full-blown integration project.
When people talk about winning big in las vegas, they wish for Lady Luck on their shoulder, but Shuffle Master, the manufacturer of automatic shuffling machines and chip counting products, found her to be too flighty a companion.
Prior to 2005, the company had been relying on a fragmented sales and order processing infrastructure that was making it difficult for company employees to find integrated and reliable business information. For example, sales forecasts were issued several times each quarter, but were of limited value to salesmen trying to meet their quarterly goals because the numbers were stale by the time they were issued.
What was behind the lag? Shuffle Master was using Microsoft’s customer relationship management system, which didn’t talk to the company’s Great Plains enterprise resource planning system—a package purchased before Microsoft’s acquisition of Great Plains. While Shuffle Master could have integrated the two, doing so would have caused problems with the technology-averse sales force, a cadre of poker players turned salesmen.
The sales team continues to use a stripped-down CRM tool to report when they’ve made a sale or lease, typing or calling in very general information such as “shuffler lease.” That information is then handed off to Shuffle Master’s sales and fulfillment staff, which gets more details such as parts numbers and depreciation formulas and then enters that data into the planning system, according to Shuffle Master executives.
“We would have had to build some sort of data translation between the two systems or re-educate the sales force to use a more full-featured CRM,” says Bryan Greene, Shuffle Master’s information-technology director. But the company, which saw revenues grow to $113 million in 2005, up by 33% from 2004, didn’t want its sales team slowed or distracted by an unwanted technology implementation.
Still, company executives knew they had to quickly collect, analyze and respond to sales and other information—in one place—if they wanted to continue growth, says Paul Meyer, president and chief operating officer. For example, with a clearer picture of what’s going on in the market, slicing information by product line, by salesperson, and by actual versus pending sales, Shuffle Master managers can better focus sales-force efforts to put more effort behind an under-performing line of shufflers or games, or give incentives to nail a big sale that nails a quota.
“When we were growing, little attention was paid to integrating our systems, and problems were given a Band-Aid fix,” Meyer says, explaining why the system wasn’t improved sooner. “When that happens in a $25 million business, it’s okay, but at $113 million, Band-Aids don’t work anymore.”
Creating a way to improve the collection and analysis of sales and other business information was Greene’s brainchild. “I wanted to get us under control and under the concept of one truth,” he says. “Everybody needed to be looking in one place for information.”
The solution: a portal, built using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 software, that pulls data on demand from more than 60 production SQL Server databases into an SQL report database that contains every customized report built by the I.T. group. The reports database serves as the linchpin, Greene says. “It runs when a user launches a report in the portal; the request hits the report database, which calls the query, runs the report and throws the result up onto the portal,” he says. Most of those reports use data from live systems, giving the reports as close to real-time data as possible.
For example, 12 custom-built reports pull information such as actual sales, pending sales and sales by product or by salesperson from Shuffle Master’s customer relationship management and ERP financial systems, and aggregate the results on a dashboard that sales executives can monitor for up-to-the-minute results.
“We’re getting more real-time information out of this,” Meyer says. “The accuracy of our revenue forecasting tool is within 1% [of actual quarterly sales] now.” Prior to this system, it took Shuffle Master 25 days to get final quarterly numbers; it did not track the accuracy rate for the paper-based system.
Using a portal to share knowledge tends to be more useful at midsize businesses such as Shuffle Master than at larger organizations, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal strategist at Wipro, a product strategy and architecture consultancy based in Bangalore, India: “The scale of a small to midsize company allows it to get great benefits from a centralized content storage access point. [Small to midsize businesses] aren’t so large as to make something like that clunky and unwieldy.”
Shuffle Master is not alone in its quest to collect, analyze and disseminate up-to-date information. The application integration and portal markets grew by 5.8% to more than $6.7 billion in 2004, according to Gartner.
Baby Steps
In developing a solution, Greene says he was mindful that he was working with the resources of a midsize company, including I.T. budget, which he declines to disclose, and a 16-person staff. He also wanted to adhere to the I.T. strategy of standardizing on Microsoft products. Why? Because using one standard vendor gives his company economies of scale and generally makes it easier to get products to interact, he explains.
In 2005, Greene says his group initially experimented with SharePoint Services, a free entry-level tool included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. SharePoint Services gives I.T. managers or designated employees the ability to create Web sites to store and share documents, calendars, contacts and announcements. Greene’s team used these features to pull together a proof-of-concept for an internal central repository of information.
After developing the prototype, Greene retained Phoenix-based InterZnet to help build the portal, dubbed Radar, in honor of M*A*S*H’s famously all-knowing Corp. O’Reilly. “He was the guy who everybody went to [for answers], and that’s what we wanted this intranet to be,” Greene says. The portal went live in October 2005.
Shuffle Master’s sales force spends a lot of time in casinos, giving in-person demonstrations of its games and products. As such, the sales team is far more comfortable shuffling a deck than clicking a mouse, Greene says. “About 75% call in their orders to their administrative assistants, who take care of logging them into CRM, while the rest do the work themselves,” he adds. As a result, Shuffle Master’s order processing and service team takes over the data automation once a sale is made, according to Al Hathy, Shuffle Master’s director of operations.
Once a sale is made, information—such as customer name, address and equipment purchased—is recorded in the Microsoft CRM and is eventually transferred manually into Great Plains’ ERP software, which comprises the financial, distribution, manufacturing and service modules.
Certain steps automatically trigger the generation of custom reports. For example, once a purchase order for a shuffler or table game has been entered into CRM, Radar automatically sends a notice that the order must be input into the ERP. Because the two systems are not integrated, the portal serves as an inexpensive workaround.
At various stages in the workflow, Radar will automatically notify service and installation technicians via e-mail that it has created customized instructions, such as installation orders, so a technician knows he has to check with the casino to do things like ensure electrical service is easily available from the table.
“Reminders come off the system to alert employees [via e-mail] to look at information on Radar at certain points in the process,” Greene says. “It cuts quite a bit of time off the service environment, and that increases customer satisfaction. Reducing the disruption to the casino floor from an installation means we get things up and running and creating revenue for our client faster.”
The automated report system replaced a static system in which the order processing team downloaded work order data into spreadsheets and e-mail, an arrangement that had more margin for error. With multiple people working on the process and updating their own separate spreadsheets, it was easy for someone’s data to not reflect the collective reality. With its live data, Radar maintains its accuracy, and users know they can access it immediately.
“When those alerts come through, they link to live reports with real-time information,” Greene points out. “It’s like a virtual assembly line.”
Wrestling With Interaction
The challenges to implementing Radar were mainly cultural—first, to get people to use it.
“Technically, you can put together a portal in a weekend, but culturally there are a slew of things to consider,” says Bill Fencken, director of business development at InterZnet.
Users must easily see the value of the intranet. Intranet owners—and it’s vital for some group to take ownership, as Greene’s I.T. department did—must also find a way to deal with information hoarders.
Greene and his team “took the iterative approach—start small, build competence internally, get user buy-in, and gather data on how the portal is used,” Fencken says. The group met with members of each department, and polled them about how they’d like the information to be organized on each departmental home page. Based on their input, the I.T. group built a home page template that had sections for items like forms, procedures and links that each department could fill in themselves. The operations group, for example, links to FedEx and the agencies that regulate the gaming industry.
Greene integrated Radar into business activities such as order fulfillment, and filled it with valuable information unavailable elsewhere, making it a natural destination for users. Ongoing evangelism helps keep Radar robust, Greene says: “It’s an education process. The biggest thing is constantly educating users on what’s available. I always worry, ‘Are we under-utilizing the system if 40% of the functionality isn’t even tapped into?’ My crusade with my business systems team is to keep that percentage as low as possible.”
Overall, Greene reports that Radar is a success, with user visits and report use trending upward steadily. “In our current state, we have 130 distinct users a day, and we expect it to be 350 in the next six months,” he says. Employees run an average of 400 reports a day.
The next big step: opening Radar from a mostly read-only portal to a more interactive one. This raises knotty questions of how to maintain content that is no longer solely created by the I.T. department, but by 300 or more employees from Shuffle Master’s 500-person workforce.
Greene plans to open Radar to users cautiously. First, he’ll let them use Excel to launch reports, which will allow them to download data such as quarterly sales trends straight to their spreadsheets rather than first having to create a report through Radar.
His group is working with InterZnet to build a process to make Radar interactive, and allow users to publish information to the portal without having to go through the I.T. staff, making it easier to share information and giving more control to users as to what’s published. Greene plans to use document management capabilities in the next generation of SharePoint to help manage the content, but there’s no doubt that his group will have less control of what is published.
Yet, those changes must not come at the price of Radar’s informational integrity. As Greene puts it: “We have a faster reaction time to what’s happening. We want that to continue.”
Shuffle Master Base Case
Headquarters: 1106 Palms Airport Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89119
Phone: (702) 897-7150
Business: Manufacturer of automatic card shuffling and chip sorting devices.
Information-Technology Director: Bryan Greene
FINANCIALS FOR YEAR ENDING OCT. 31, 2005: Sales of $112.9 million, an increase of 33.1% over 2004; net income of $29.2 million, an increase of 20.9% over the prior year.
CHALLENGE: Increase sales of automatic card shufflers and
table games to casinos by tracking sales trends using up-to-date information.
BASELINE GOALS:
· Grow revenue and earnings by 30% annually.
· Increase international revenue to 50% of total by 2009, up from 23% in 2005.
· Increase number of daily portal users from 130 in April 2006 to 350 by year-end.
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Pembahasan :
Case diatas menerangkan bagaimana Informasi terpusat sangat dibutuhkan dalam suatu organisasi untuk mensinkronisasi antara tiap bagian. Shuffle Master menginvestasikan dana untuk mengembangkan portal sebagai implementasi dari knowledge management dimana didalammnya terkandung repositori dari knowledge yang dapat yang mendukung goal dari organisasi.
Tiap individu dapat mencari dan membagi knowledge yang mereka miliki, dan juga external knowledge yang diserap oleh organisasi.