infoTECH Feature

February 09, 2016

The "80/20 Rule" for Standardizing Software

By Special Guest
Tom Buckley, CEO of StayinFront

When Enterprise Resource Planning software was first introduced to help integrate and streamline the key business functions of an organization, many large companies adopted and licensed the sophisticated software new to this space. They understood that standardizing processes and the software that drives their back-end operations would result in economies of scale, efficiency, and the ability to grow more rapidly.  By limiting customization and adopting best practices they could also speed innovation, reduce costly reconfiguration expenses and more rapidly develop markets and their customer base.

Many medium and small size companies have standardized their back-end office solutions, too; however, applying a “one size fits all” approach to your customers is often not a winning strategy. At StayinFront, we roughly follow an “80/20 rule” of standardization/configuration. By providing a core, standard solution that addresses more than 80 percent of the key functions of an organization and allow for 20 percent configuration, companies large and small can strike a balance that saves time and money while increasing customer satisfaction.

There are many advantages to adopting best practices in a specific industry and then standardizing the software that drives those processes. One advantage of standardization is it’s less costly and easier to manage. If you adopt a different application for each market or region it is harder to maintain, and these fragmented systems, each of which may require a different solution or resources to fix, are more difficult to upgrade and update. This is a challenge given the constant change of business regulations, economic conditions and other factors that force businesses to continually enhance applications and software. The resource and cost is a significant burden regardless of the size of your company.

With standardization, new applications can be rolled out quickly and require the work of fewer people, reducing the cost of deployment. A standard system also means less training and specialization for members of your IT department and generally for the users of the system.

However, most companies require some differentiation to meet their specific needs, which can include competitive advantage, unique laws or regulations and matching the software to the specific hardware in use in the field (for example an Android smartphone or an Apple (News - Alert) tablet). The ability to rapidly configure to provide the relevant fit but leverage the standard base is therefore vitally important to customer adoption and success. By configuring (not customizing) up to 20 percent of your software, you can easily integrate apps, add or delete steps or processes and incorporate additional data fields to your core system, which can then be utilized when companies require a new functionality or task for a particular region that is not available on the standard system.

At StayinFront, which offers sales force automation solutions for the consumer goods and life sciences industries, we work with many of the major multinational consumer goods brands to standardize and deliver our solutions to their thousands of sales reps across the globe. Doing so allows our clients the ability to efficiently leverage a referencable standard which is used to drive best practices and in-store execution, as well as to track and measure store-to-store conditions and results and make needed adjustments – all through one centralized system.

Getting the Customer On Board

Aligning best practices and defining standard processes can be difficult for many organizations. When defining the 80% or more to be standardized, talk to your customers, sales professionals and operations team about the essential requirements needed for the business. What are the most important functions needed in order to execute their key business functions on a day-to-day basis?  For customers operating globally, this may mean aligning different regions. We’ve discovered from our experience that many functions are similar across countries, regions and routes to market, but they are often described in different terms. .  

Once you’ve identified best practices, determine the most efficient and effective way to deliver and maximize them. Outline and summarize the differences and if possible, group, align and prioritize these. Develop a playbook with your team to rapidly deploy and train. Note that future changes can be made through configuration and incorporate relevant and permanent changes into the standard.  Your standard should always be able to evolve when it needs to.

Be Prepared and be Agile (News - Alert)

Businesses – and the environments they work in – are constantly changing. Just as there are local laws and regulations that require flexibility to be built into the software that is deployed globally, there must also be room for changing standard processes when needed. A company may change by expanding into a new market or adding a product line, or to address a new competitor. For most customers, there is often the possibility of changing laws. 

Whatever the reason, the idea is to have a technology that is agile enough to handle change and that can adapt quickly. Using a cloud-based solution is the key here, as it allows you to easily adapt and scale. By balancing core standardized functionality with market-driven configured features, companies are best positioned to achieve their strategic goals of doing more, knowing more and selling more.




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
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