The best approach to get business to perform as expected is to cut through all the hype and get to the weaknesses of either business or application processes. This, in other words, means benchmarking and incidentally due to limited resources and time, benchmarking is also the one thing organisations avoid most.
Infomet realised the headache many businesses are stuck with and developed the Benchmark in a box (BIB) solution to not only benchmark the business processes but to also to analyse the business processes.
Business might be good on the forefront but if the production systems working in the background cannot process the information efficiently and fast enough, business will not go well on the forefront for very much longer.
Addressing these shortcomings in a production environment is not as easy as getting the vendor in to rectify the problem. To analyse the shortcomings of a production system there will always be at least two stakeholders involved, the vendor and the client, each with their own agenda.
The client wants a faster production system but feels it is unfair to be expected to pay good money again to the vendor for the same system. The vendor argues that the specifications changed and to deliver a faster system with the current specifications is outside the scope of the maintenance agreement between the client and the vendor.
With each stakeholder having their own agenda, a classic he said she said deadlock scenario is quickly created where neither one of the stakeholders want to accept responsibility of the current situation. The only effective solution to a problem like this is to involve a neutral third-party that will be able to effectively analyse the problem and produce a honest, 100% unbiased manager`s report at the end of the day that will in detail show the flaws in the production system, whether it is flaws in the client`s processes and hardware or flaws in the vendor`s software. Just producing a detailed report is not enough, however; the vendor must be kept up to date throughout the analysis process and should be actively engaged concerning their software architecture in order to produce an accurate analysis of their software.
Infomet specialises in the analysis of production systems that are underperforming and maintains a professional distance from both the client and the vendor to avoid alienation from either the client or the vendor. A typical real world example was when a major retail group approached Infomet as a neutral third-party to analyse the current SCM production system. The current system was performing adequately for almost a year but because the retail group had had such a successful business year, the volume of data the production system had to process was growing so fast, the system was not able to cope with the load anymore.
Immediately the retail group blamed the SCM software vendor, expecting the vendor to rectify the problem without any extra money being paid to the vendor. The client felt the system was barely in production for a year so why should they pay again to fix a `faulty` system. The vendor wasn`t willing to take ownership of the problem, arguing that the system was not at fault, claiming the retail group`s processes were not optimal.
To analyse the problem we used the Infomet methodology to analyse the client`s current production process and the client`s current hardware setup. We used the same methodology to analyse the vendor`s software. The Infomet benchmark framework was used to analyse the performance of the current production system on different hardware and with different software configurations. With the explosion of the World Wide Web, information is limitless but in many cases not applicable to all situations and in some cases just plain marketing hype.
Infomet eliminates the speculations and rumours by actually benchmarking the real production process by cloning the production environment on the Infomet Benchmark in a box (BIB) server. This enables us to produce benchmark results that are not only relevant to the unique production environment but are also in a format the client and vendor is familiar with. The BIB also allows us to do as much production runs as possible without being limited by the client`s own production systems that need to share resources.
The BIB server also eliminates any marketing hype in the business world surrounding certain hardware and software architectures by producing hard facts relevant to the client`s unique production environment where profiled data commonly used in standard benchmarking does not.
At the end of the benchmarking exercise Infomet produced a manager`s report stating all the flaws in the current system, both on the retail group`s side and on the vendor`s side. Infomet also created a roadmap, through the collaboration between the vendor and the retail group, which detailed the approach each party will take to solve the inadequacies. Finally, after months of deadlocked negotiations between the retail group and the vendor, there was closure and both the retail group and the vendor could start working together to create a more efficient business system.
For more information on Infomet or the BIB offering, go to www.infomet.com.
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