When Tom Kelly took over as president
and CEO of Epicor Software Corp. in
February 2008, he set out on a fact-finding
mission to learn more about the organization.
Kelly knew quite a bit about the business
after eight years of service on the company’s board, but he had been isolated from
most of the day-to-day work that was
done at Epicor’s locations around the
world.
He wanted to know the enterprise
resource planning software business the
way his 3,200 employees did. He wanted
to see what the customer saw.
“The essence of Epicor rests as close to
customer as possible,” he says. “If you
think in terms of communications, you go
where your customers are. You start
there.”
He headed out and spent the first few
months in his new position in front of
employees and customers, listening to
their ideas and complaints. He asked them
what they thought Epicor was doing well
and what they thought the company could
improve upon. Kelly met with employees in
person, over the phone and through video-conferencing — whatever it took to generate a dialogue.
“Initially, I wanted to look the employees
in the eye and listen to them tell me what
they thought we could accomplish at
Epicor,” he says.
One factor in particular was integral to
the success of Kelly’s information-gathering travels: keeping an open mind.
“That was my foundation point,” he says. “I
didn’t walk in with a game plan of changes or
a game plan of what we had to do to bring
Epicor to the next level — I walked in with
my ears open because I knew there was a lot
of transition under way.”
One of the things he quickly discovered
was that Epicor’s growth was hurting the
company’s long-term potential. What was
once a small, agile, $154 million company
in 2003 had become a $430 million rapidly
growing enterprise through internal
growth and acquisitions.
The company’s agility had always been a
cornerstone of its growth. Without the ability to accurately interpret data and then
rapidly take action in response to market
changes, the company’s design and development of enterprise resource planning
software may have never happened in the
first place.
Kelly’s challenge was not to find ways to
move more quickly, it was to find out how
to keep Epicor’s agility as the company
continued to expand. His objective was to
adjust the company to its new size without
sacrificing the core things that made
Epicor so successful.
“Reinvention doesn’t necessarily mean
changing your DNA,” he says. “It means
allowing you to participate in a current
market just as effectively as you participated in a prior one. We’re reinventing ourselves so we know how to operate in this
new size just as effectively as we operated
in our prior size.”
