|
Winning Growth Strategies
Indeed, winning midmarket CIOs do some heavy lifting -- overhauling systems with small IT staffs and little money for training -- and they also perform some tricky balancing acts in managing rapid growth within tight budget constraints.
In Woodbury, N.Y., Veeco Instruments Inc. is aiming for that glorious $1-billion revenue goal to which so many midmarket companies aspire. Now a $450-million manufacturer of high-precision tools and high-tech components, Veeco has grown at 5% to 8% annually and expects this expansion to continue.
The growing life sciences market is accelerating demand for Veeco's precision tools, which are used in the manufacture and testing of microelectronic products. "Our tools are pretty amazing," says IT Director of Infrastructure Linda Chan. (One such tool -- Veeco's BioScope atomic force microscope -- was featured on a recent episode of CSI: Miami.)
In recent years, the company made 12 acquisitions that resulted in disparate legacy systems around the globe. That sort of growth meant that Chan's 15-member IT staff had a big job on its hands: a unified ERP system to manage the expansion. Chan oversaw the successful implementation of phase one of a global SAP project last year. "One of our greatest success stories is the implementation of the software on our own," she explains. "[SAP partner] itelligence helped us with the blueprinting phase and with getting our second site up and running. We were able to transfer knowledge to our own internal team and implement SAP in the Veeco facilities." The SAP Enterprise project is ongoing at Veeco's eight manufacturing sites and 12 international sales and distribution offices.
Like most midmarket CIOs, Fred Cook is managing growth at his company in the face of increasingly fierce competition. For him, it's all about grabbing market share and new customers for the $77-million North Shore Credit Union.
"In Vancouver, financial services are not for the faint of heart," says Cook, who joined the credit union in 2003, when assets totaled $600 million. Today, assets are approaching $2 billion, although the number of customers has grown by only 4%. Cook says this asset growth stems from a combination of better treasury management practices and improved customer retention using a "member intimacy" program that relies on several technologies, including a customer relationship management system from Pivotal Software, an enterprise content management system from FileNet/IBM and a Microsoft SQL server-based business intelligence system. While the industry-standard retention rate for customers is about 75%, North Shore is in the 90th percentile.
"We're all going after the same pockets. If you don't know where your value proposition lies, you'll get your lunch eaten," Cook says. Customers who walk into one of North Shore's branches get a personalized banking experience, complete with cappuccino service in the lobby and friendly tellers who greet customers by name (and match them with the photos that pop up alongside customer account information). "We've created more of a retail feel and flow," Cook says.
Without an experienced CIO at the helm, some growth spurts in the midmarket could overwhelm a small business. Take 40-year-old, family-owned Telecare Corp. In recent years, this $160-million provider of psychiatric care facilities based in Alameda, Calif., has grown to become one of the largest providers of adult mental health services in the country and now has 50 offices in five states.
With that growth, however, came an increasing sense of separation between remote offices and the home base. "People out in the field felt disconnected from the corporate office and from IT," says CIO Philip Chuang, who joined Telecare in early 2006. "We weren't even doing a great job of answering the phones." So Chuang created two "relationship manager" positions, recruiting people from business operations into IT to advise new facility staff. He halted the use of IT contractors at field offices and set up consistent IT processes across the company. He now sends some of his 22 home-office staffers out to the facilities as needed.
The CIO also revamped the field office "startup" procedure by designing a mobile training lab called Big Boy: a shipping crate filled with laptops, networking gear, peripherals and training materials. Every time a new field office gets ready to open (which happens about eight times each year), the Big Boy crate arrives with everything a training manager needs to get staffers ready (including bags of welcome chocolates).
When he mapped out the before-and-after metrics of opening a new office, Chuang could show his business colleagues that in 2005 only 37% of Telecare's new facilities were fully functional on opening day, compared with 100% in 2006. "IT really must integrate seamlessly with the business," he says. "Today we've got stronger, more personal relationships with facility staff in the field."
|
