On April 20, 1994, the company's operations were switched over from the old system to the new one. As the orders poured in, the telephone operators found themselves forgetting how to navigate through the system, encountering unfamiliar error messages, and running into situations that hadn't been covered in their training. Employees had been instructed to shout "Fire!" when they were stuck so Fenske or a DSM programmer could run over and get them out of trouble. But within an hour the "Fire!" shouters were stacked up, waiting for help. Even worse, the technical helpers had so many problems to deal with that they gave up trying to explain to employees what the proper procedure was; they just entered the correct commands and ran to the next fire, leaving the employee to face the same problem minutes later. "That just made our people feel worse," recalls Terri, who was running around hugging people and telling them that the problems weren't their fault. Despite her efforts, some order-takers were so upset by their inability to get orders into the system that they broke down and cried.
The situation wasn't much better for Cowan, who was running the show in the inventory area. PSC normally has between 200 and 300 boxes ready for shipping by the time the first carrier truck pulls up, at 3:30 p.m. That day it had just a single box ready.
Tensions were so high in both the offices and the inventory area that though the day's work wasn't nearly done, Cowan sent everyone but the top managers home at 7 p.m. Terrified that he would go back on his one-day-turnaround pledge to a substantial number of customers for the first time ever, Cowan stayed well past midnight packing boxes with Terri, Fenske, and a few others. Then they drove the boxes to the nearest UPS hub. They made it, barely. For Cowan, the experience brought back the old days -- and he wasn't particularly pleased to be reliving them.
By the next day, order taking and shipping were starting to run more smoothly. But when Cowan sat down in front of a PC to pull out the sales data he generally used to feel the pulse of the company, he found to his consternation that he simply couldn't figure out how to retrieve the information that the old system had always provided -- never mind pull out the answers to questions that had been beyond the old system. "Here we were with our new, $200,000 system, and we didn't know who our top customers were," says Terri. Adds Cowan: "I felt like I was back to my floppy-formatting days."
It took Cowan several weeks to get the minimum information he needed to monitor sales. What he finally saw horrified him and Terri: Paul Mitchell sales had dropped 15% in the past two weeks. "We had focused so much on making sure we didn't fail on delivering orders that we had taken our eye off the ball completely when it came to sales," he explains. Even worse, they couldn't figure out exactly where sales were falling -- for which salespeople, which customers, which products -- because they were still having trouble getting the data they needed.
Little by little, things have improved since Hell Week. Orders now go in as quickly as ever, and they don't have to be printed out for manual filing. Thanks in part to the ClipperShip add-on, the new system has been particularly adept at speeding warehouse operations. Order pickers are now told by the system exactly which items to place in which boxes according to destination and weight; the system even takes into account where each item is stocked, to keep the picker's route as short as possible. It then selects a carrier and prints out an invoice and an address label. Turnaround time on typical orders has been cut from 5 hours to 20 minutes.
As for getting all Terri's questions answered, Cowan says he's sure the system will be a success on that score, too -- but it will take several more months before he and Fenske figure out how to gain access to the answers. At least they now get the information they used to get, and a little more besides. Cowan is also negotiating with DSM to spread the cost of adding the credit and back-order features among PSC and several other customers.
Could PSC have found a less traumatic way to make some of the improvements? Cowan doesn't think so. Aside from taking the word of DSM's salespeople on the missing features and not setting aside enough time to practice with the new system, Cowan believes the company did things about as well as it could. To a large extent, he contends, the problems are just inherent in the process of computer upsizing. "It would be easier if you could do it in small steps," he says. "But we needed a leap, not a step."
Oh, and by the way, Cowan reports that the new system formats floppies just fine.
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David H. Freedman is the author of Brainmakers: How Scientists Are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
ROI
Professional Salon Concepts' new computer system cost $200,000, including hardware, software, and implementation fees. Before laying out any money, CEO Steve Cowan and controller Mike Fenske worked out three fairly concrete financial justifications for purchasing the new system. The return on their investment (ROI) breaks down this way:
