All The Right Moves

Getting taxpayers to foot the bill for your new IT system.

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Case Study 01

How do you relocate your business and install a brand-new information-technology system at the same time? Get someone else to pay for it

Who: Total Scope Inc.
Where: Boothwyn, Pa.
What: High-tech medical-instrument repair
Revenues: $3 million
Problems: An antiquated computer system; insufficient office space
Solution: A government grant to fund new digs and new technology

Last year Maurice Glavin gave his company, Total Scope Inc., a top-to-bottom exam. His diagnosis: the eight-year-old company, which repairs high-tech medical instruments, was basically strong and healthy. But it urgently needed two things to thrive.

First, the growing company--bursting at the cornices of its third set of offices--desperately needed to find space that would accommodate future growth. Second, Total Scope was long overdue for a total technology transplant.

In the first years of his company's life, Glavin hadn't focused much on office space or computer systems. He and his two cofounders had other, more urgent priorities: hiring skilled technicians, bringing in new business, and building a reputation in an industry crowded with better-known players.

So early on, the founders made do with whatever they could find, working first from Glavin's home and later in a series of rented office suites in Wilmington, Del., shoehorning in new workers wherever they could find space. Meanwhile, for each leap in business and every new name on the payroll, Total Scope simply grafted additional hardware and software onto its existing computer systems.

By 2000 the company had grown to 30 employees, and they were all using aging equipment riddled with eccentricities. One vice-president used a desktop computer that--because of a broken power switch that nobody had time to fix--could be turned on and off only from a power strip on the floor. "In small business, everybody does workarounds," Glavin says. "But as you add more people, it magnifies the technology problems. It really exposes the weaknesses."

Nowhere were those frailties becoming more evident than in Total Scope Management System (TSMS), the proprietary software Total Scope had used since birth to keep track of repairs and maintain service records. With more employees entering more data on more jobs, Glavin and his executive team increasingly noticed the system's shortcomings. Among them: multiple records for a single piece of equipment and an overnight lag--once standard, now unacceptable--when it came to updating information.

With his profitable company approaching $3 million in revenues in 2000--up from just $215,000 in 1994--Glavin decided Total Scope couldn't continue to grow at such a pace while still working around balky technology. Since the lease on his company's office space was about to expire, Glavin decided it would be great to kill two birds with one stone: completely revamp the company's information systems and upgrade his office space at the same time. Which is exactly what he did. What's more, he got somebody else to pay for a big chunk of the cost.

In June 2000, Glavin moved Total Scope to its own well-wired office building in a different state. To do so, he and his executive team had aggressively negotiated an impressive economic-development package with their newly chosen state.

"As you add more people, it magnifies the technology problems. It really exposes the weaknesses," says Maurice Glavin, CEO of Total Scope Inc.

Glavin launched Total Scope in 1992 with his wife, Ann, now the company's treasurer and quality manager, and his cousin Timothy, the company's chief operating officer. Their timing was no accident: it was year one in the modern era of medical cost cutting, with newly elected president Clinton calling health-care reform one of his administration's top priorities. The three cofounders assumed that hospitals would rather repair than replace expensive high-tech medical devices such as endoscopes, the camera-equipped tubes used in gastrointestinal and orthopedic procedures.

They assumed correctly, but they weren't the only ones who had. Other entrepreneurs--notably some refugees from the big-name companies that manufactured the instruments--had also launched repair shops for scopes and similar devices. To distinguish themselves, Total Scope's founders emphasized a fast turnaround for repairs. They pledged to cut service time from three days--then the industry minimum--to 24 hours or less. Living up to that promise, of course, meant keeping efficient, error-free track of every scope making its way through the repair process.

Not surprisingly, the founders found no off-the-shelf software tailored to their needs. So they turned to Odyssey Technologies Inc., of Sarasota, Fla., whose CEO happens to be Christopher Glavin, another of Maurice's cousins, who agreed to work gratis for the first few months. Odyssey built a DOS-based project-management system written in the then common X:Base language. The software--TSMS--did a fine job of maintaining Total Scope's records for several years.

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