Not Just For The Big Guys Anymore

Sophisticated, affordable computer systems are helping smart companies get even smarter.

Thanks to rapidly falling prices coupled with rapidly increasing performance -- a rarity in modern commerce -- computing power that once was the domain of monied corporations is now accessible to less well-heeled companies. Even so, among the first to take advantage of computing's price/performance bonanza was $11-billion Eastman Kodak Co. Last year, Kodak began sowing the desks of key executives with personal computers, providing each with software applications tailored to his or her specialty: quality control, manufacturing costs, production schedules, sales forecasting, and so on.

When lotus Development Corp.'s chief financial officer, Mick Prokopis, visited Rochester, N.Y., to check on how the PC project was faring, he found that top-level officers were churning out "first-class management reporting -- and in blazing color, too." Thus inspired, it came to Prokopis that "a small business could be doing exactly the same thing. The guy who runs a pizza shop can be compared with senior executives at Eastman Kodak!"

Predictably, small computer companies themselves are tapping now-accessible information streams in inventive ways. Where not long ago only people from finance had access to computers, even in large companies, "here just about everybody has his own," says CFO David Hiatt of two-year-old Language Technology Inc., in Salem, Mass. One of the models triggers marketing investment decisions by measuring inquiries against sales by source. Within two days after month's end, spending can be reallocated to areas showing the best return.

Index Systems Inc., an international consultant, specializes in helping managers to gain advantage through technology. "It doesn't take a financially sophisticated CEO," says president David Robinson. "Just someone who has broken through the computer barrier."

Given the limitations of PC software, however, no CEO can bet on making money simply by pushing buttons on a desktop computer. But that era may be coming. Already, so-called expert systems for PCs are building in time-tested business counsel. One new financial program for the Macintosh, Insight, from Layered Inc., performs accounting functions, extracts financial ratios from them (cash receipts versus sales, for example), and, with seemingly innate intelligence, spots trends and suggests strategies. The analyses are not compiled from the idiosyncracies of the given operation, however, but are from generalized cases stuffed into the program.

With the coming generation of PCs, whose processing capabilities will approach those of a mainframe of only a few years ago, will come true logic, in which artificial intelligence techniques will uniquely deduce financial decisions from the operating history of the business itself. Next year, surely everyone will be turning profits.

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