Mike Edenfield keeps his
employees in the loop,
but for Logility Inc. to succeed, they need to keep him
in the loop, too.
When the president and CEO
of the supply chain management software developing company meets with employees,
communication runs both ways.
“Sometimes, there are decisions made or actions taken
where, on the surface, it’s not
self-evident as to how that supports the company’s strategic
objectives,” Edenfield says.
It’s his job to explain those
decisions, and it’s the employees’ job to help Logility improve
on its record fiscal 2007 revenue
of $43.8 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Edenfield about how to get employee input and how to use it
to set your company’s priorities.
Q. How do you sort through
the feedback you receive?
Sometimes, you get very
detailed, specific feedback that
might not be appropriate for
that type of meeting. Depending
on what it is, their manager
will get back to them, or I’ll
address it right there, depending on if it’s something to
address in that forum.
If it’s feedback like, ‘Why
aren’t we spending more money
on this product than the other
one?’ we have a business
process that handles that. So
we’ll describe where we are in
that process and why we made
the decisions we made. Many
times, they are involved in that
process, as well.
Usually our customer service
personnel have great suggestions
on how to make the system easier to use. They know what customers are struggling with, what’s
hard for them to understand,
where we need to improve.
We have a product review
board, which meets on a regular
basis. We have representatives
from customer service, from
implementation services, from
sales and marketing. I sit on that
board, our VP of R&D sits on
that board, and we have a senior product director who sits on
that board. So we get input
from all aspects of the company
on where to take the product.
Q. What are the benefits of
getting input from all aspects
of the company?
We get plenty of suggestions, not only from our
people but from our customers. Everybody has a
different perspective
depending on their role in
the company.
For example, if we just
listened to customer support, they would be
focused on how to improve the product on a
day-to-day basis. They
might be considered tactical and will help the customer.
But if we just listened to
them, what we wouldn’t
have is where to take the
product strategically.
What’s coming in from
the marketplace in terms
of industry trends that we
need to support?
We get that from our consultants, and, quite frankly, our
sales and marketing team does
a good job when they’re calling
prospective customers of hearing what they’re looking for.
Then we have to balance it.
We have to keep our existing customers happy in terms
of tactical things. However,
management really wants
strategic enhancements. We
have to balance both, because
if we don’t make the strategic
enhancements, we won’t be
able to continue to invest long-term in the product.
So, in that committee, we
have a process where we rank
things and decide that way.
Q. How does the ranking
process work?
Our new releases take anywhere from a year to two years
to develop and roll out. When
you look at all the suggestions
we get, we might have 200 tactical suggestions from customers.
Then our sales and marketing
team might come in with
300 suggestions. Then our R&D
organization will say, ‘Microsoft
has come out with new technology that we have to incorporate
because they’re sunsetting the
old technology.’
The R&D organization gets all
of those things and puts some
ballpark numbers on how long
each of those will take. Let’s say
it will come out to 50,000 man-days of R&D. We’d schedule it
out for how long we want it to
take, and we’ve got 10,000 man-days to allocate to it.
First, we get the scope of how
much time we have, how many
man-days we have to apply and
the total number of days we
have requested. Then we quickly
go through a first cut on the
strategic things. Then we specifically go look at the customer
requests that are more tactical,
to make sure we have enough of
those in there to more than satisfy the customer base. So that
might get us down from 50,000
man-days to 25,000 man-days.
Then we’ll start debating as a
team what the critical ones are.
Q. How do you decide what
the critical priorities are?
There will be some pretty
healthy debate there, like, ‘We
need to have this. Our competitor has it, we don’t, we have to
have this.’ Or, ‘This is a huge
trend coming. If we don’t do
this, we’re going to miss this
window to go after a segment of
the market.’
We have a lot of different
types of discussions like that.
But we end up agreeing as a
team as to what the priorities
are. … Once we decide, we’ve
decided, and we’re done.
HOW TO REACH: Logility Inc., (800) 762-5207 or www.logility.com
