Alloway kicks himself for not realizing when he bought the network that both he and the vendor, Computerland, a chain based in Saginaw, Mich., were out of their league. "The poorly knotted neckties on the high school-aged salesmen should have tipped me off," he says. "But what were my options? Companies our size are not going to call IBM or NCR or DEC."
At least Alloway had the smarts to ask for a written performance guarantee from Computerland. The parties agreed he would pay one-third of the $27,000 price tag on delivery and the remainder when the network was up and running. Withholding payment did little, however, to motivate Computerland to solve the slew of problems that beset the LAN.
According to Alloway, the network never stayed up more than a day or two at a time. And whenever it went down, Computerland's solution was to add a new piece of hardware or software to the network -- at Alloway's expense. For example, he found himself forking out about $2,000 for a dedicated printer server, despite the vendor's initial assurance that one was unnecessary.
Says Alloway, "It was such a disaster that the business went on hold for a year." In fact, he blames the network for an embarrassing printing error (a misplaced decimal point in an annual report) that cost him one of his most important clients, a large credit union in Ohio. "That was $40,000 a year lost right there," he says.
The situation with Computerland got downright ugly when the retailer sued Alloway's company in 1993 for back payment. The two parties settled out of court just a few months ago. Not surprisingly, Credit Union Marketing is no longer a Novell site.
After such an experience, Alloway would have been perfectly justified in running his business the old-fashioned way: with manual typewriters, light tables, and waxed paper. Instead, in the past year and a half, he has become one of the most wired businesspeople you're likely to meet.
On sales calls he packs an Apple Newton MessagePad 120 for taking notes. ("Clients like to see a little show biz," he says.) If he's working on a newsletter, he may pull out a QuickTake digital camera, also by Apple, and snap a shot of the credit union's employee of the month. Later, at his hotel, he'll put the Newton back to back with his IBM Thinkpad and zap the information on an infrared beam from it to the notebook. Then he'll dial in to his new LAN back in Michigan -- a 12-node peer-to-peer network that runs InvisibleLAN -- and upload everything onto the network. And if it's not too late at night, he'll send an E-mail to his wife, Katie, who shares CEO responsibilities with him.
Once scorched, Alloway vowed to do things right on his second network. He asked around and got the name of a LAN expert. And this time Alloway tried hard not to be penny wise. Each workstation on his new InvisibleLAN has a tape drive for backup and an uninterruptable power supply -- two niceties Computerland had left out, causing Alloway no end of trouble. All told he paid about $28,000 for the network, including PCs, scanners, printers, and the network software. He's already seen a handsome return on that investment. "The quality of our work has gone up hundreds of percent," he boasts.
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Transforming the Company
Some people question whether it's appropriate for executive management to become entangled in networking. But not Michael Levinson, president of the Weekend Exercise Co. (WEC), a $40-million women's activewear and sports-apparel manufacturer headquartered in San Diego. "For networking to truly transform a company," he says, "someone has to be able to see the big picture and the connections the network can make in all parts of the business."
Without that kind of view from the top, technology tends to accumulate in islands of automation, as it had at WEC. Founded 13 years ago by Levinson's father, Arthur, and two other partners, the company had PCs scattered everywhere for word processing and was using a minicomputer-based order-management system when Michael Levinson joined the company, in 1991, after a stint as a Wall Street lawyer followed by several years of practicing real estate law. "We didn't see the benefit of networking," he says. "We thought we were already on the cutting edge of technology."
It's true that the company's electronic-data-interchange (EDI) capabilities, which allow the electronic transfer of invoice and purchase-order information, were comparable to those of much larger companies. And the company was doing UCC-128 carton coding before competitors in its industry. Yet Arthur Levinson was still writing all his correspondence to customers and suppliers by hand. Even today he doesn't have a PC in his office.
Still, riding on the success of its popular Marika and Baryshnikov lines, the company was growing a respectable 15% annually. Why fix what wasn't broken?
Because cracks were beginning to show. Sales at the company's high-margin specialty store, for example, were sagging. And problems with order processing were hurting the company's delivery record and driving up costs. "We were ripe for reengineering," Levinson says.
The problem, he believes, was the virtual barbed-wire fencing around the IBM RS/6000-based order-management and inventory system. The software, Paragon, simply didn't allow for flexible reporting or quick error checking. As a result, 20% of orders sent to the warehouse had mistakes of some sort. "Our shipping people were spending their time fixing problems instead of filling orders," Levinson says.
To make order information more accessible to the sales force, in 1993 Levinson hired a programmer to create a PC-based system that would mirror the Paragon database. The program he wrote (dubbed OPAL for "order processing application for laptops") allowed the company's 40 sales reps to dial in, upload their orders with on-line error checking, and download updated inventory information onto their laptops. In addition, managers could use their familiar Windows-based accounting package to generate ad hoc reports and fine-tune inventory management.
