Gonzalez spent months putting all the company's processes under a microscope. What he saw hardly thrilled him. "Not even Marwan understood how much was being done manually," he says -- nearly all the invoicing and all the financial statements. "People here were compensating for the limitations of the system," Gonzalez noted. "It wasn't really a system." It was more like a dragon to be slain.
Before he could start building a new system, Gonzalez needed to understand each and every task the company performed, both on-line and off. He spent days with the back-office people, who were struggling to prop up the operation. "I sat, I listened, I watched, I walked around, I learned," he recalls.
And he drove his increasingly impatient boss to the edge of distraction. "He wanted to know every bit of information the company tracked and why," says Kashou. "He kept asking me these questions about what we wanted to know, what our customers wanted to know, what questions we'd be asking tomorrow. I kept saying, 'What are you talking about? Let's just build the thing.' "
Meanwhile, Gonzalez was slowly coming to the realization that Collectech was, more than anything else, a selling machine. "Everybody here sells," says Gonzalez. "I'm selling you right now." So Gonzalez started hanging out with the sales force, especially those who pushed the limits of the current system with their custom demands. Harlan Hornbruch in the Seattle office was particularly hard to please; he had earned the title "Mr. Option" for form-fitting services to his clients, and the back office lived in fear of his special requests. Gonzalez made Hornbruch's needs his model.
Collectech's marketers had a grab bag of wants and needs for Gonzalez. Could they call up a graphical cost comparison between Collectech's services and those of competitors during a sales call? Could they whip up and print out a customized letter to the prospect on the spot? Could they enter orders electronically? Could they look up client data when- and wherever they needed it? Could they offer customers an easy way to swap information on-line with the company? Sure, said Gonzalez, they could have it all, and more. The sales reps swooned with anticipation.
Kashou became rhapsodic, too. It occurred to him that with gigabytes of account history at its fingertips, Collectech could become an expert in various client industry niches. "With the right systems in place, we'd become this gold mine of data for customers who wanted to know how they stacked up," he explains. "We'd be in the information business in a big way." He envisioned whole new levels of customer interaction and devotion based on E-mail and electronic data interchange. "Forget taking them to a ball game -- we could bond electronically all day," he says. "We'd have these electronic hooks deep into customers. I thought, man, you do that and you're not just another vendor."
But building those capabilities, it turned out, would take more than the four months originally allotted to the project. Gonzalez had already spent that much and more simply studying the guts of the business. When he finally started showing Kashou prototypes of the system and its features, Kashou figured Gonzalez must be only weeks away. That's when Gonzalez explained how "prototyping" worked: you quickly throw something up on the screen, you show it around to get feedback, and then you redo it and get more feedback. And then you repeat the process 3, or 10, or 50 times, until you've got what you want. Gonzalez wasn't weeks away from finishing, he was months away -- if they were really lucky. More likely, it would take a good year to finish writing the heart of the code. That was perhaps Kashou's most painful lesson: demos were sometimes distant dreams, and warp speed was something that happened on TV.
December came and went. January, February, March passed and still no system. Summer turned to fall, and while much of the code had been written and the new hardware installed -- including a 486 Novell server and a 90-megahertz Pentium-based database server -- Gonzalez still faced the laborious task of testing the system to find and fix the usual myriad of bugs. After that would come the job of moving the data from the old system to the new one. More than a million records would have to be pulled through, along with 2,000 customized sales letters that were being distilled into a few dozen templates. The old system would not go gently.
Still, on the horizon, across the miles of code and hours of work, dangled a powerful payoff: the torquing of Collectech's sales engine to ever-higher revs. "Then we'd be selling, really selling," promised Gonzalez. It was the one thing Kashou needed to hear to help him keep faith.
* * *
It is late September, and Marwan Kashou is pacing the worn carpet of a one-room MIS department, preparing to address the troops. CTech Express is late. Again. Testing has already been suspended twice. The bug reports keep coming: the system pulls up the wrong invoices when posting payments; it chokes when printing complex letters; one server fails completely. Maybe there are memory problems. Maybe it's the hardware. No one knows for sure yet. But whatever its source, this, Gonzalez admits, is one tarantula of a bug. "Printing letters -- it's only our business," he shrugs.
Testing and debugging the new system competes for Gonzalez's time with the demands of propping up the old system, which requires periodic triage. Gonzalez has temporarily abandoned hopes of adorning the CTech Express with fancy features to focus on simply getting a modified model of it running. Deadlines, revised and rerevised, have been missed three times already. "It's a little scary," he says. "We're looking at the numbers for next year, and all those projections for sales and production are predicated on this new system being up and running. We know what we have to do. It's just that we have less than three months to do it."
