Philip Cable did as much due diligence as he could imagine before picking a vendor to update his company’s legacy software. Turned out, it wasn’t enough.
Cable operates American Science & Surplus, with catalog and online sales as well as three stores in the Chicago and Milwaukee markets. For years all his firm’s activities ran on software from a firm that went out of business in the 1980s. A former employee of the defunct vendor kept the computers running, but Cable knew he needed a new system.
He looked at nearly a dozen vendors, made several trips to interview them and their customers, and he finally settled upon one of the biggest in the business. Converting all his old data to the new system went well, and Cable’s business switched to the new system in August 2004.
That’s when the trouble started. The new system failed to send updated catalogs to some of Cable’s best customers. Sometimes it lost orders that were submitted.
Each time Cable contacted the vendor, he got advice, software fixes and a lot of support. But the system’s performance improved slowly. The 2004 holiday sales season was off significantly, and the company registered a loss for the year.
“It was a horrible Christmas for us,” Cable said.
After seeing so many live demonstrations and talking to numerous satisfied customers, Cable was mystified over what went wrong. It turns out that the software supplied by the vendor was an upgrade from the older versions.
“In effect we were beta testing the new version,” he said. “If they’d installed our software just a few months sooner, we’d have gotten the older version and saved ourselves a lot of headaches.”
It’s an unavoidable hazard of doing business these days, he said.
“Our legacy software was just skating along at the edge of a cliff,” Cable said. “We had to replace it. Going with the industry leader and checking them out seemed safe. Then all these issues arose, some of them affecting our customers.”
The glitches included cash registers at all three stores that regularly froze up simultaneously, resulting in long checkout lines. While the new software still isn’t operating as expected, it’s much better than it had been, and Cable’s business has bounced back.
“We just recorded the best three weeks of sales in the company’s history, and holiday sales are way up,” Cable said. “But what a painful year and a half.
“It’s a cautionary tale.”
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Little cash for nanohealth: While the federal government spends about $1 billion annually to finance research and development into nanotechnology, only a small fraction, some $39 million, goes for environmental, safety and health nanotech research, a new study concludes.
The government is bullish on nanotech, and the National Science Foundation projects that in a decade, nanotech will have a $1 trillion impact on the world economy, employing some 2 million workers.
But more money needs to be allocated on health and safety issues, the study from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Pew Charitable Trust concludes.
Specifically, more research is needed into the potential health effects on workers in nanotech industries. Also ripe for more study is how nanoproducts will be disposed of or recycled once their useful life is complete, the study said.
While U.S. spending on such research may be low, the report conceded it is greater than that provided by any other country.
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