Management News and Products.

AutoCAD LT 2000i

AutoCAD LT 2000i is a CAD product for users requiring occasional CAD use in extended design teams and for new-to-CAD customers.

AutoCAD LT 2000i includes drawing feature enhancements including improved polyline editing, quick select, layer management, and more user-friendly plotting capabilities. It features a new file navigation dialogue, Microsoft Windows 2000 compliance and enhanced help and learning capabilities for both new-to-CAD and occasional CAD users. Its 100 percent round-trip drawing compatibility with AutoCAD 2000i enables customers to work collaboratively on design teams with AutoCAD users. New online collaboration capabilities allow AutoCAD LT 2000i users to interact and collaborate on designs in real-time, whether adding information to a design or expanding design content itself. These new Internet features include: AutoCAD LT Today, provides information access via a live browser connection to a personalised view of the Autodesk Point A design portal through an HTML-based window inside AutoCAD LT 2000i. Users can access recently used files, tips and techniques, news feeds, live updates and content posted by the CAD manager, and industry information or downloads. AutoCAD LT Today also serves as a window into the company intranet or project Website, providing information that helps users be better connected with projects and colleagues around the world.

Publish to Web, allows AutoCAD LT 2000i users to publish drawings to the Web using a simple wizard. This allows users to easily share data - customers, partners, and the extended design team. Users can collaborate with colleagues or partners and CAD managers can teach AutoCAD LT 2000i to multiple employees from their desk.

Meet Now, which uses Microsoft's NetMeeting technology for hosting meetings on the Internet and intranet, offering real-time electronic presentation and collaboration capabilities. AutoCAD LT 2000i costs 595 [pounds sterling]. At www.autodesk.co.uk

Customer Centric

Data mining specialist, SPSS, has launched an end-to-end analytical CRM solution to enable companies to make more effective decisions at every point of customer contact, including the traditional store, call centre, Internet and via direct marketing. CustomerGentric applies data mining techniques to provide organisations with a customer intelligence system to enable companies to more effectively target their consumers by delivering personalised offers.

CustomerCentric enables organisations to personalise every transaction at every customer touchpoint. www.spss.com/uk

Packaging Code Management

The new Package Coding Management System, developed by Claricom Ltd, offers a cross-brand networking solution for most types and makes of coding equipment. While the facilities may exist to network machines of the same model from the same manufacturer, until now there has been no means of connecting all relevant equipment along a production line and across a plant. Claricom estimates that its system can deliver annual savings of over 40,000 [pounds sterling] per factory. These are achieved through a reduction in product and packaging waste and avoidance of product recalls due to coding www.claricom.co.uk

Brio.Enterprise 6.2

Brio.Enterprise 6.2 responds to customer demands for providing support for more operating systems, increased speed, security and stronger end-user capabilities. Enhancements have also been made to Brio.Insight, Brio's Web-based client that delivers query, analysis and reporting functionality within a Web browser, Brio.Enterprise 6.2, is a large step towards expanding our customers ability to place the control of information into the hands of the users," said Katherine Glassey, chief strategy officer at Brio Technology. "Our development team has spent considerable time to make this product faster and more scalable, while expanding the breadth of its core offering.

Brio.Enterprise 6.2 responds to the specific requests of our customers and the changing needs of the market."

Increased functionality in Brio.Insight allows customers using the Web to create and modify individual queries, reports, pivots and charts, which exceed the constraints of predefined data sets. Users benefit by faster access to the right information, while eliminating the administration burden of creating a new data model each time a new report or query is required. Certification of Sun Solaris 8, allows the Brio.Enterprise 6.2 product offering to nm on the latest release of Sun's UNIX operating system. Additionally, Brio.Enterprise now supports Netscape iplanet Web Server 4.x, including Windows NT/2000 and all supported UNIX platforms.

Brio.Enterprise 6.2 and. the new features can be found at http://www.brio.com/products solutions/brio

Software Speeds Payment

StreamServe, has extended its software to offer companies the facility of delivering payment information directly to individual Internet bank accounts. Based on StreamServe's XML technology the solution works in three steps. An invoice is extracted from the suppliers business system (SAP R/3, Baan, Oracle etc). The data is then transformed into the format required by the banks payment portal (XML, CXML, EDI etc). This data is then sent over the Internet or by using an EDI connection to the banking provider.

The banks customers can display the invoice and authorise payment which the bank can then process and pay the supplier. www.streamserve.co

Retail Sector Lags as CRM Explodes

The UK's largest retail, wholesale and distribution companies are in danger of lagging behind other sectors in adopting CRM systems, the growth of which is set to explode during 2000, says a new research report. The report Key Issues in CRM - reveals that only 33% of large retail, wholesale and distribution companies are planning to introduce CRM during 2000 compared to 61% in finance and 54% in media and publishing.

81% of the largest companies in the retail sector see CRM as being very/extremely important for keeping existing customers and 96% see it as being very/extremely important for increased sales.

Despite giving a clear endorsement of the benefits of CRM, only 24% of the largest companies in the retail sector are actually using or planning to use CRM for sales, service and call centre performance analysis, compared with 61% of the largest finance companies which are doing so.

Likewise, only 64% of the largest companies in the retail sector are actually using or planning to use CRM for customer data analysis, compared with 100 of the largest finance companies which are doing so.

Requirements for successful CRM

The research identified a number of keyr equirements which users see as important to the successful implementation of CRM. Two-thirds (68%) of the sales and marketing management from large companies interviewed for the study believe it is an important/essential for everybody who will be affected by new CRM applications to be involved in their design, evelopment and testing; and 80% believe that ultimate ownership of such systems should reside with the sales and marketing department. Interestingly and somewhat surprisingly, while the ability of the (CRM) system to be accessed via the InternetlWWW is seen as important, it is not as important as other factors One interpretation is that, despite all of the hype surrounding the Internet/WWW, most CPM systems are still being implemented over internal networks, with little accessed CRM benefits

The research revealed mixed views on the success to date of customer relationship management applications While more than half (54%) of large companies feel that CRM applications deliver a good to www.protagna.com

Viewpoint- Team Selection - a business critical process.

Professional Service Organisations (PSO) repeatedly face the challenge of fashioning project teams from a pool of scarce resources. Teams they hope will prove to be dream teams. But real world constraints mean that the team formed to tackle an assignment is seldom the best the organisation could theoretically field, and rarely even the best possible solution from the resources available.

This is due to the fact that although organisations have access to vast quantities of data about potential team members, they rely largely on human judgement to select the optimum team.

The problem is, that most data of this type is held within databases, And with databaises you only get out what you ask. Structured data usually means structured answers, flexible only within certain pre-defined parameters, because the query types available as part of database packages are limited and not tailored to a company's individual use.

If for example, a French-speaking engineer with a knowledge of C++ is needed in Paris tomorrow. Defining what is needed and searching ... and, will likely get nothing back. Never mind that there's someone fitting that description two hours away in Lille. And he's free to travel. In the area of teams, the process can become more complicated. For a start complementary skills, positions, locations experience the result can be a nightmare task. Taking a rigid, exact-match-only approach just makes the task harder. Little wonder then that many orginisations often draft in external consultants to carry out work when there's usually somebody internally who could do the job perfectly well.

To solve this problem, PSOS are using solutions such as Professional Services Automation (PSA). These however, only automate data collection and storage. They don't assist much in the judgmental or clever part of selecting a winning team. For example, a PSA solution could probably provide, a list of the French-speaking, change management consultants available for a three-week project in June 2000, It would struggle to return the best combination pair given the project definition.

Until now, that call has been left to the user. The user, however, can't possibly know, everyone within an organisation, and shouldn't have to spend substantial amounts of time on this when the system is supposedly automated.

APSA is only useful for its intended purpose, the planning and management of projects, not the search and match process. Using it for this end represents a large outlay and substantial disruption for a system which is really designed to do something else.

Organisations are increasingly turning to building their own search functions, either on top of the PSA or in place of it, for use with internal databases. Mainly rules-based, these are designed to fill in the gaps created by the inadequacies of incumbent mechanisms. But rules are also rigid. And as people change (and so do skills), the database won't be able to evolve with them.

A system like this is easy to create using a set of IF constructs. But rule sets are by their very nature complex to write and even more difficult to maintain, How do you balance language against skill-set whilst remembering to take account of both location and availability? Out of a number of staff that represent a close match, which ones are closest?

Whilst resource selection is a tricky management task, alternatives do exist which, with minimal disruption to existing systems, could deliver leaps forward in process efficiency. Advances in areas such as pattern recognition technology now mean that if the organisation can define `best' then a `best fit' team can be found. Fuzzy search technology ensures that parameters aren't fixed. They're flexible and intelligent enough to know what constitutes an exact match, and what's a close fit. How this works is all based on algorithms, but that's not important. What is, is that you gain a degree of flexibility which mirrors the human thought process rather than a programmed machine, Take the previous example, if you've deomed `French', `Paris', `Tomorrow', `C++' and if you don't get that exact match ,you'd still get something useful, e.g. all criteria except `Paris' but with `Lille', `Lens' and `Calais. You can then make an informed decision as, to whether any of the people available, is well placed to take the job.

In a team selection scenario, the ability to offer alternatives (even when exact matches are found) is invaluable if you're to get a well balanced group. After all, teams comprise people with different roles and different strengths so if you're going to achieve this you need to see all the options clearly. www.ncorp.corp