* * *
Rebecca Matthias
President of Mothers Work, an apparel manufacturer and retailer in Philadelphia with $59 million in sales
We would like our designers to design on screen. As it is now, only the pattern makers work on screen. To design on screen, you have to have the technology that allows you to see the "drape' of the fabric, that is, how it reacts with the pattern -- how it folds, its weight and thickness, and so forth. For instance, if you're designing a dress from a heavy piece of wool, it's going to look very different from a dress designed from a very thin piece of silk because of the drape of the fabric.
To get the computer to read the drape of the fabric, engineers place an actual piece of the fabric the designer is working with in a little box, and somehow the computer reads the qualities of that fabric and digitizes them. That means the designer can scoop out the neck and then hit a switch and see how those lines drape on the form. Unfortunately, as it stands now, we have not found a system that functions adequately. There are several out there, but nothing that we consider worth it because they are still very clumsy.
The real benefit of using technology is not that it reduces the cost of pattern making but how it affects time to market. It takes us about a week to design a garment. Designing on screen would allow us to cut that down to a day, which is quite significant. Eventually, it will save us the whole step of repeatedly making up the pattern and sewing it up. Further down the road, we will do everything on screen, even the next step -- computer-generated cutting. Soon a garment will be taken from conception right to production using one computer system.
* * *
Dale Uhl
CEO of Wastren Inc., a 100-employee environmental-consulting firm in Idaho Falls, Idaho
We are in the process of integrating a new software system that allows us to manage large projects. Our current accounting system generates weekly reports every Wednesday. So we are generally three or four days behind real time, and in today's consulting world that's not a particularly good position to be in, especially if you are a small, growing company.
As a small company, we deal primarily with large numbers of smaller contracts, and we have to make sure we stick to the budget or the client will be very upset. That can be difficult to manage under a weekly reporting system.
We're implementing a software program that operates as a time-card entry system. At the end of the day all employees at each of our nine sites will enter their billable hours into the system. If funds are not available in the account you're billing time to, your hours won't even be accepted. At about 5 p.m. our system at the corporate office will automatically dial the site offices and pick up all the information that was entered. The information will be integrated into the company accounting system, and then the computer will redial the sites and update their systems. All this will take place before 8 a.m. So when you arrive in the morning, you'll be able to see what your costs were as of yesterday.
The system will allow us to make sure that only authorized people charge on a contract, and project managers will be able to see all charges to their projects every 15 hours. We'll have a lot of control. The payoff will be high performance on our projects in terms of cost control and consumption of all the funds that are available without overrunning the contracts. Our physical cost for the whole thing -- for the system and integration -- will be about $18,000.
* * *
Ed Charbonneau
Director of MIS, Genzyme Corporation, a biotechnology firm in Cambridge, Mass.
We have recently had a fair number of acquisitions, and given the state of the biotechnology industry -- the way it's going in terms of the entire market and certain companies' capitalization and existing revenues -- there will likely be more consolidation in the industry. Using an international network as your backbone to link various acquisitions, or even pending acquisitions, gives you the ability to join and unjoin those entities very quickly and very dynamically. It gives you a little more flexibility, which is really necessary in today's business environment. Going to AT&T or NYNEX and saying, "Please connect us to this company in California,' takes a little more time than giving the researchers or the businesspeople of a certain entity your Internet address and saying, "OK. Let's exchange these documents.'
One of the things we are considering doing is improving our access to the Internet. We have a connection through a dial-out basis, and we have left it at that point for security reasons. We feel we have done a pretty good job of addressing internal security, but when you start to connect yourself to a broader global network, you open yourself up to external threats.
* * *
Mike Molony
Vice-president of $15-million Pet Ventures, a pet supplier headquartered in Arlington, Va.
We're considering looking into multi-media for employee training. In training for retail there is a lot of role playing, and I think you might be able to systematize and make more consistent the training you provide by using interactive technology.
