Part 1 of this blog series depicted the rise and fall of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois (US). At the end of the post, I mentioned the merger of Servigistics and Click Commerce’s Service Network Services (SNS) division. The private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners acquired both entities recently with the idea of forming a new combined company to solve the planning, optimization, execution, and analytics challenges associated with delivering post-sale service.

Part 2 then presented two blog entries with opposing views on the merger and its prospects. It raised the point as to whether any prospective company in need of service-oriented solutions would look for an all-in-one service lifecycle management (SLM) solution (platform) per se, or would maybe start evaluating the service capabilities of their incumbent enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider, possibly combined with more focused best-of-breed vendors. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series depicted the rise and fall of of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois, United States (US). At the end, the article mentioned the July 2009 merger of Servigistics and Click Commerce’s Service Network Services (SNS) division.

The private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners acquired both entities recently with the idea of forming a new combined company to solve the planning, optimization, execution, and analytics challenges associated with delivering post-sale service. The new company, with estimated combined revenue of nearly $100 million (USD), will be headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (US) and retain the Servigistics name and its chief executive officer (CEO). Read the rest of this entry »

The old adage “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword” might have been best witnessed in the life and demise of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois (US). With its roots in the partner relationship management (PRM) or demand channel (chain) management (DCM) space, the company had first gobbled up a number of struggling PRM/DCM peers in the early 2000s. These mergers coincided with a time when there was a growing realization that the niche PRM market was not sustainable on its own.

Namely, the pundits saw the possible PRM future only as a part of a broader customer relationship management (CRM) suite or an even broader enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. Following up on these PRM acquisitions and some internal development of the quote-to-order (Q2O), content management, and master data management (MDM)/product information management (PIM) capabilities, Click Commerce eventually rounded out its Channel Management division sometime in 2005.   Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced the need for knowledge management (KM) software applications as part of a more comprehensive and strategic service management (SSM) suite. One such broad SSM suite has been advanced by Servigistics, and Part 2 zoomed into the capabilities of one particular part of the Servigistics SSM suite: Service Knowledge Management (SKM). Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced the need for knowledge management (KM) software applications as part of a more comprehensive and strategic service management (SSM) suite. One such broad SSM suite has been offered by Servigistics.

Servigistics’ Service Knowledge Management (SKM) solution, the newest module within Servigistics SSM, is designed to meet the requirements of the technical service organizations that manage complex problem resolution. The crucial issue is that technicians, dealers, agents, partners, and customers need in-depth knowledge to solve complex problems.

Diagnosing issues in these complex environments (e.g., motor vehicles, aerospace & defense [A&D], medical equipment, appliances/white goods, high tech) requires interaction and a comprehensive understanding of the essential diagnostic variables. As a good example, medical doctors have been provided with a framework that allows them to be masters of the diagnostic method because of their years of diagnostic training. As a trained diagnostician, the doctor is able to capture the essential diagnostic information from the patient and match it against prior treatment experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this blog post might sound like a no-brainer: as clear and indisputable as the “motherhood and apple pie” adage. Yet how many times have you dealt with a seemingly not-really-knowledgeable call center person over the phone or a clueless technician that showed up at your door? To be fair, maybe those folks were knowledgeable in principle, but were still ill-informed about your particular problem, previously explained at a great length to someone else within their company.

Why on earth then did the call center agent ask you to repeat all those personal and problem-related details, or why did you have to explain yet again the problem and symptoms to the field technician, who then had to go back to the office to bring the (hopefully) correct part? In the do-it-yourself (DIY) self-service scenario, how many times have you had to plow through numerous pages, pesky hyperlinks, and/or an abundance of annoying questions (that endlessly branch into more questions)?

And all those attempts only to eventually give up on the self-service diagnostic adventure, and to yet again be put on a lengthy hold (with “sleepy elevator” Kenny G’s music being periodically interrupted with the annoying “please hold the line, as your call is important to us” mantra) in order to talk to a human being? And as Murphy’s Law would have it, the solution often turns out to be as asinine as you just needing to plug the machine into the wall or removing a lost sock from the filter. Read the rest of this entry »

Not long ago, I wrote about the pricing management and optimization software market, and in particular depth about two bullish vendors and fierce competitors in the business-to-business (B2B) manufacturing and distribution segments: Zilliant and Vendavo. Look for similar write-ups down the track on DemandTec, Symphony Metreo, and on the Servigistics pricing solution (whereby the last will focus solely on spare parts pricing and planning).

While I do not plan to cover the esoteric pricing solutions used by airlines or hospitality companies (e.g., Rapt or PROS), there is also a vibrant pricing market in the retail sector, as seen with SAP’s acquisition of former KhiMetrics and Oracle’s similar acquisition of ProfitLogic. In addition to TEC’s article entitled “The Retail Battleground for Pricing Management”, you can find more information about SAP’s perspective on the pricing market here, and Oracle’s pricing offering here.

But, the dates of all these articles will indicate that they were done during a still-solid economic milieu worldwide. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that we are now in quite a down economy. Given the dreaded “R” world hovering over us, are there any trends (or hunches) on how manufacturing, distribution and retail organizations use pricing solutions? Namely, do the enterprises have different pricing approaches in good vs. bad economic times? Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog topic introduced MCA Solutions and its flagship Service Planning Optimization (SPO) solution for planning and optimizing spare parts [evaluate this product]. That blog post also tackled MCA’s notably good times during 2007. In the meantime, an informative post on MCA was also published by the Sourcing Innovation blog.

A related 2007 milestone at MCA included a significant expansion with both new and existing customers in core markets, including aviation and defense (A&D), high-tech, and semiconductor manufacturing. Specific wins included the first joint effort with SAP for a large commercial aircraft manufacturer, expanded work with the US Navy to include planning for the entire naval aviation fleet, and successful deployments at new medical and capital equipment customers.

In addition to working with the largest corporate customers, MCA also cited growing revenue in the mid-market.  With its SPO OnDemand Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, MCA hopes to bring to smaller service organizations the same capability that service leaders in the Fortune 500 are seeing value from, but with a much lower upfront software and information technology (IT) infrastructure investment.

These benefits are attributed to lower monthly costs and faster implementations. The vendor will be expanding this offering in 2008 to make it even more appetizing and faster to deploy. The most recent win with the OnDemand SPO solution at Unisys Corporation might be a sign of succeeding with on-demand model at larger corporations as well as appealing to the mid-market. Read the rest of this entry »

Regardless of the economic environment (and sentiments), I always think of the opportunity within the aftermarket service and support as a profitable, high-margin and customer-captive business, and yet, still underserved. General Electric (GE) would be the proverbial example of a company that has focused on aftermarket opportunities, going so far as to call itself a “services” company as opposed to a “products” company.

GE indeed, starting with Jack Welch’s long chief executive officer (CEO) tenure, has been widely reported to have significantly increased both its total revenue and profitability by focusing on services opportunities in addition to developing world-class products.

The manufacturing corporate giant has certainly proven the value of serving the product aftermarket, which has recently been purported in a quantifiable manner by many pundits as a high margin business. For instance, AMR Research reported recently that businesses earn 45 percent of gross profits from the aftermarket, yet it is only 24 percent of their revenues, while a recent article in Harvard Business Review claims that we all spend US$1 trillion every year on assets we already own.

A related software category term was mentioned in TEC’s 2003 article titled Service Lifecycle Management - Tapping into the Value of the Product Aftermarket. Namely, Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) is a business initiative focused on servicing a company’s products, and the customers that bought them, after the product has been sold. Simply put, SLM focuses on making more money from the product after the initial sale. But it is more than that — it is also a way to become a strategic part of the customer’s business after the sale is completed. Read the rest of this entry »