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The SOA Shake-Up
Formerly the CIO of Nike, the Gap and PepsiCo, Harris now heads an IT team of 40. While Shaklee is the largest natural nutrition company in the U.S., its IT budget is but a fraction -- some 5% to 10% -- of what Harris worked with when he led large-scale enterprise IT teams (whose IT budgets were in the neighborhood of eight or nine figures, he says).
More challenging still: When Harris was hired 18 months ago, he was charged with transforming IT from a cost center into a principal piece of the company's turnaround strategy. That was the edict from the new CEO, Roger Barnett, who assumed leadership of the 50-year-old company two years ago, just six months before Harris signed on.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Shaklee's management had failed to sustain IT investments, and the company's IT systems suffered for it. When Harris joined, he found a lot of extremely old technology in critical business areas. "It was literally mainframes running 10- and 20-year-old software," Harris says. "They weren't even at the client-server level in a number of critical areas."
Few systems were integrated. Basic services, such as order entry or product lookup, weren't available to distributors, sales reps and customers via the Web. Vendors had no visibility into the company's supply chain. Manual data entry abounded.
These were big problems for a company that was re-branding itself and going global. Shaklee, which sells products that range from natural hair conditioners to air purifiers, needed to update its technology to become relevant to a new generation of consumers and distributors. Shaklee's business model relies on multilevel marketing, so it's crucial to attract motivated reps. The company needed a highly evolved supply chain providing anytime, anywhere access.
"We needed to quickly bring capabilities to field distributors via the Web and handheld devices to provide them with state-of-the-art information and communications support," says Harris. Shaklee also needed to bring efficiency into the supply chain by providing "tools for browsing inventory, checking product, selling product, placing orders. Our business turnaround depended on an IT turnaround."
Thanks to Web services, that plan is now in hyperspeed. Harris is building a SOA that will ultimately replace more than 90% of Shaklee's IT systems.
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