With MVaaS from Envysion a customer can log in remotely and download the video directly to the PC themselves without ever needing to send a thing.  Envysion also provides a feature called My Clips which allows cusotmers to download video and save it directly to our secure data center as well.  The My Groups feature allows customers to remotely share the video saved in My Clips with anyone in the organization without ever sending a thing.

The tools Envysion provides make it very easy to download and share video but the customer asked if I could still help them with these 30 minutes clips.  They were traveling and needed to get these video clips to an officer for an investigation which led me to a great service called Yousendit.com.   They provide digital content delivery so I signed up for the basic service which is free and allows me to send up to a 1GB file.  I was able to help my customer and sent the four 30 minute clips, about 60 MB of video. 

Having the right tool for the job can really save time and money.  The MVaaS provided by Envysion and the SaaS provided by Yousendit.com are both great tools that can really help get the job done.

The North Pole Toy Facility is a complex of over 25 separate toy making locations spread out over 100 square miles.   The facility has over 5,000 elves all working to supply toys to the children of the world. Needless to say it is quite a complex job to manage all of the seasonal worker elves spread throughout the multiple locations.   

As the demand for toys has grown so have the toy making facilities and it has become increasingly difficult for Santa to manage the vast number of elves.  In an effort to improve operations and become more efficient Santa has chosen to install Envysion Video at every location.  Santa can now simply log-in with a user name and password and instantly see live video at any location or do a quick search and pull up video from the last 30 days.

Mrs. Claus has been on Santa for some time now to start spending more time with her, but with the toy demand increasing time has been very limited for Santa.  Santa will now be able to stay home with Mrs. Claus and log-in remotely and be able to make decisions without having to gear up the sleigh and reindeer to travel to the toy facilities in person.   In the words of Santa Claus himself ” Envysion video is so easy to use that I can log-in in a blink of an eye and see how the toys are coming along”.  In the words of Mrs. Claus herself ” Thank you Envysion for giving such a great operational tool to Mr. Claus, it has really freed up his time and we have been spending some great quality time together”.

By utilizing Envysion Video, Santa has more time which makes Mrs. Claus very happy.  All of the reindeer including Rudolf are happy because they also have more time to play reindeer games by not having to drive Santa to the toy facilities as often. The children of the world are especially happy because Santa is so much more efficient that he can easily keep up with the increasing demand for toys.

Effectively managing a team requires time, effort and an understanding of information (e.g. trades, injuries, trends) that is crucial to a successful season.   A GM has a lot of information to dissect each week in order to give their team the best chance to win.   The first couple of seasons I found it difficult to keep up with all of the trades, added/dropped players, injuries and the progress of free agents, which one can add to their team if someone on their team has a bye week or isn’t performing.  Finally, I activated a feature on the Fantasy Football web site that I had never used before, “Alerts”.  The second that I enabled this setting I became a much better GM and could make decisions that would affect the outcome of the game days in advance.  The alerting function of this website takes information that is being gathered about each NFL player and proactively alerts (sends and email) each GM based upon criteria they have designated as important.  A GM can be alerted to set their line up, player updates, league trades, and scores.  This information can be vital to the planning of your starting lineup each week and if acted upon can give your team a competitive advantage.

MVaaS acts in much the same way as the Fantasy Football website.  Through the integration of software based business applications e.g. POS systems, access control, temperature sensors etc. an owner or manager can set up reports with specific business rules, that if broken, can generate an alert that proactively prompts a user to log in and review video from a specific location.  For example if I have an MVaaS solution integrated with my POS system I can define a rule that if a site has more than ten voids in a day I want to be alerted.  This type of capability can come in very handy when making tough decision about your Fantasy Football team, and more importantly your business.  I find it to be a great asset to be able to make decisions based upon up to date information.

We had a good time and it was a good PR event for Envysion. Here’s a couple of short videos I took at the event with my iPhone:

I don’t need to tell you that the economy stinks right now and that times are tough all over.  Matt spoke about the prospects for our company which are very strong thanks to the hard work of the management team in general but especially Michael Wilson who was our Finance Director but is now our CFO – a very well deserved promotion. Michael is somewhat of a magician as it applies to finances and has ensured that we are in a terrific position financially regardless of the economy in the near term.

That said, Matt wasn’t painting a rosey picture. One of the key messages he delivered is that we need to be better at what we do and that we need to focus on doing only those things that support our customers and the business. This can be boiled down to doing what’s important vs. doing what’s urgent. This is an age old struggle that effects every business and it certainly has plagued us.

The concept is simple but the execution can be difficult. At the heart of the concept is the thesis that one can only accomplish so many things in a given time period. In today’s world the list of tasks to choose from is often overwhelming. In order to be most effective one should strive to do only those things that support one’s Wildly Important Goals – these tasks are the important ones – and ignore whenever possible those tasks that don’t.

There’s a great post about this at PickTheBrain called Important vs. Urgent: 5 ways to focus on what really matters.

In our case we know what our WIGs are because Matt oultined them for us. So in order to be effective we need to do only those tasks and participate only in those activities which support those goals.

I’ll be posting more about this in the future and I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the topic.

We’ve done some fun things over the last few months and I’m remiss in not posting about them. But that will change and as a step in the direction of posting more frequently about the Cutlure Club’s activities I wanted to post about our recent Envysion pumpkin carving contest.

The Culture Club wanted to do something fun that involved the families of our employees and we settled on a pumpkin carving contest where employees would bring their kids and help them carve some really cool pumpkins. We’d give prizes for the best pumpkins and have cookies and punch for the kids.

We had a terrific turn out and some really fantastic pumpkins. So many, in fact, that we had to invent 2 categories for prizes. I’ll be posting a photo album containing all the photos we took but for now I wanted to show the winner of the traditional carved pumpkin Mr. Will McDonald son of Joey McDonald our senior systems engineer. Will’s pumpkin was scary and traditional.

Will McDonald

Thanks to Bridget Hamilton – our office manager and Culture Club member – who helped us get all of the carving supplies we had some pumpkin adornments of the Mr. Potato Head ilk. As a result of the great designs resulting from these adornments we had to create an additional category and awarded the prize to Chase Jensen son of Chris Jensen one of our sales folks.

Chase Jensen

As you can see there were a lot of really great designs.

Just a few of the contestants

And folks had a great time gutting and carving the pumpkins.

Gutting and carving

Even our CEO Matt Steinfort got into the act with his kids.

Matt Steinfort and kids

Perhaps the best scary face of the afternoon though came from our VP of Operations Bill Steinfort.

scarygrandpabill

All in all it was a grand time and all the kids really enjoyed themselves – even us grown up ones.

What is strange – in a wonderful way – is the two reasons she was calling today. The first was to to check and see how I was feeling as I’ve been sick for over a week (some would argue much longer than that but that’s fodder for another post). The other reason she called was to say that our MVaaS application has made her work life easier.

Apparently she’s in the middle of six fairly major LP investigations right now and as a result has had to watch a ton of video from various locations. Our application has helped her do more, faster and given her the ability to do it remotely. Her comment was, “The app has made my life easier”.

It feels good to have the kind of relationship with a customer thath they call to see if I’m feeling better but it feels even sweeter when they call to say that not only is everything ok but we’re making their life easier. To me that’s the definition of Return on Investment and a really great measure of how well we’re delivering on our customer’s expectations.

Source: www.ihop.com

Today, IHOP has more than 1,300 restaurants in the US. To grow and sustain leadership in a crowded market is no easy feat, so congratulations to IHOP for achieving this milestone. Pancakes, anyone?

I recently had the pleasure of attending the IHOP National Franchise Conference (considering it was in Hawaii, the pleasure was all mine) and sitting in on various sessions celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the brand and addressing concerns of IHOP Franchise owners.  No doubt these concerns are not exclusive to IHOP and are shared across many restaurant brands.  One particular session reminded me of a previous post by Jeff Gannon on portion consistency and trimming food costs.

In this breakout session titled Food for the Future, IHOP’s Jay Miller, Director – Research & Development, spoke to attending franchisees about upcoming changes to the menu, addressing franchisee concerns about food quality, cost, and vendor selection.  He also played a few news clips negatively highlighting IHOP among those restaurants busting belts with high fat and calorie count menu items.  He spoke of the growing interest from government entities in mandatory publishing of Nutritional Values on menus and the implied importance of portion control.  Here not only can portion consistency help manage food costs more precisely as prices continually creep up, but more importantly it can protect the image of the brand and its reputation.  Imagine what’s at risk if portions are exceeded, the media secretly tests that plate and nutritional values don’t match those published by corporate.

Once again MVaaS provides an opportunity to manage not only the hard costs, but also the soft costs associated with a household name being condemned by the media for false representation of nutritional information, or anything else for that matter.

Easier said than done. The most customer-focused companies are easy to spot when it comes to consumer products and services. The top performers are familiar brands, such as Nordstrom and Apple. Can we apply best practices from these top consumer brands to business-to-business marketing? I think so. I believe it comes down to clarity of focus on the customer experience:

1. Make it easy to understand your product or service, and be clear about what problem it will solve for the customer.
2. Set expectations up front – how long will it take to deliver/install/build? What are the system requirements to ensure seamless integration?
3. Deliver on what you commit to, within the time frame you commit.
4. Reinforce the good decision your customer made to buy from you by providing outstanding follow up during the post-purchase window (within ~30 days of purchase/install/delivery).
5. Monitor ongoing customer satisfaction through client care, follow up communication, and surveys.
6. Act on customer feedback. If you’re not going to do anything about feedback, then don’t ask for it.

To deliver consistently on all 6 facets, everyone from Product Development, to Service Delivery, to Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Accounts Payable is involved. Organizations that successfully focus their entire team on the customer not only have satisfied customers, but they also give their employees a sense of making a difference and doing a job that matters to the customer – and to the company’s bottom line.