Shibui-IT™: The making of a user-centric business intelligence tool
/a Business Story by and with Klaus D Mueller, Founder of kdm semi consulting
Before it all began
Looking at our product Shibui-IT™, its earliest beginnings date back to the 1990s. At that time, I held various positions in sales and marketing for a large integrated device manufacturer (IDM).
Business then was not so much different from what it is now. As a sales executive I had two major objectives: first, to win new projects with existing or new products, and second, to deliver the promised shipments on time.
Each sales organization typically had its own templates for project tracking which were then manually summarized by a sales operation function. This information was delivered to the product marketing people who managed the capacity planning together with the supply chain organization. The sales organization, which was supposed to be the direct link to the customer, was not involved in these processes. Customer information collected by sales and operations/marketing existed on different platforms.
The key focus, in those days, was to develop tools and processes to improve manufacturing resource planning. Tools that integrated both data sets from the sales side of things, today called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) did not yet exist. For each customer project or delivery meeting, the delivery status, the project update, the current, historical and projected revenue information for individual products had to be compiled in a time-consuming manner. A holistic and integrative solution was nothing but a pipe dream.
A pattern emerges
Fast forward to the 2000s and some of the same challenges continued. In my role as an executive in distribution, I was tasked with satisfying our franchise partners by increasing sales and, at the same time, achieving the desired profitability of the distribution company through high product margins, low inventory costs and the targeted ratio of personnel costs to revenue performance. The latter requirement could be mostly monitored and controlled with existing ERP systems, which had sprung up by this point. The purchase control especially for new products or products for new customer projects was largely done in a manual way. No integrated CRM and ERP platform existed.
However, the most challenging task at the time, and still is today, was that the various franchisers required quarterly reviews. To prepare them, key individuals at the operational level worked together to manually prepare the requested information. Again, there was no solution available that would have automatically generated customized reports, which would have significantly reduced all of our workloads.
In 2007, I returned to an IDM where my main task was to reach new customer segments and expand into new markets with both legacy and new products. Due to the size of the company, it was advantageous for my global sales organization to be able to work very closely with the marketing and business organizations to ensure a good information flow between sales/customers and operations. The availability of CRM market solutions helped to collect and register all relevant customer information. An ERP system also helped to meet most of the customer delivery requirements.
Like most companies, we held regular review meetings where the company’s strategy had to be checked against actual product and customer performance. But yes, you guessed it, familiar challenges presented themselves yet again. There was no platform solution to integrate ERP and CRM data.
Breaking the mould
After having dealt with this recurring problem for well over a decade, I opted for a different approach to solve this dilemma. It was time to try something new.
Relief came, temporarily, in the form of an IT expert I hired, who used existing software solutions to merge the two data sources. Through painstaking and still largely manual labour, reports were created that provided the daily bookings, billings, new business, project monitoring per product and customer and much more for the various business reviews. We didn’t know it at the time but we had just created an early ancestor of Shibui-IT™ – albeit an analog one.
Shibui-IT™ takes shape
Many years and various strategy consulting roles later, I was stunned that my former nemesis – the missing link between ERP and CRM data – was still at large. Although new and better business intelligence solutions had become available, the puzzle remained unsolved. I also saw that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were disproportionally put at a disadvantage by this lack of innovation.
This prompted me, in the second half of 2015, to reunite with my former IT expert, who had once succeeded in filling this void by manually combining ERP and CRM systems. We discussed how we could transform this one-time project into a commercially viable enterprise that can spare others the pain and operational inefficiencies we have had to endure for so long.
We came up with the following visionary concept:
“To merge the complex data volumes of ERP and CRM systems and, with the help of various applications, to process these large data volumes in such a way that they can be presented in a comprehensible manner.”
The motto guiding our endeavours came from the very name we gave our product. Shibui is a Japanese word that expresses an aesthetic sense of simple, subtle, and unobtrusive beauty. With Shibui-IT™, our aim was to develop a software solution that pays homage to this balancing act of simplicity and complexity.
A blueprint was created to transform the idea and concept of Shibui-IT™ into a SaaS product. My former IT expert turned business partner developed the first proof of concept (PoC) at the end of 2015 by using the development software of a well-known ERP software provider. The first tests were a success. The first Shibui-IT™ applications were presented to the public on our website in Q4 2015.
An initial challenge was finding a client that would take the leap with us. It is important to keep in mind that while the integration of ERP and CRM systems sounds straightforward on paper, it is a revolutionary concept that many companies continue to vehemently resist. Breaking routines and traditions, however wasteful they might be, is a difficult undertaking.
In early 2016, my partner and I decided to introduce the SaaS solution Shibui-IT™ to an Asian trading company. The challenge we faced was similar to an experience I once had as an executive in a European distribution company. To push the on-site deployment of Shibui-IT™, my partner decided to move to Asia. The initial activities were promising. The first Shibui-IT™ BI applications presented in the PoC were well received. However, one of the biggest challenges was uploading data from multiple sources to our Shibui-IT™ data repository. For this, a special connector had to be developed, which we later named Shibui-IT™ Advanced Connector (SAC). I will return to this topic later.
Bumps in the road
Like many software start-ups before us, we soon reached the limit of our budget. The cost of continuing to use the proof-of-concept development software had become too expensive. We were confronted with two stark choices: go completely into debt or find a more affordable development software. We opted for the second option and presented Shibui-IT™ to Microsoft Canada and were subsequently granted the desired software development tools that met our budget and technical requirements.
However, with one problem gone a new major technical challenge emerged. The business logic of the PoC had to be rewritten from scratch; new software had to be learned. After some months of programming, we were confident that we could rebuild our Shibui-IT™ solution with Microsoft. The beginning was made and with the creation of kdm semi consulting GmbH the necessary legal structure was also established.
This was the beginning of thirty months of intensive software development during which the existing Shibui-IT™ BI PoC was converted to fit a new software architecture, and the Shibui-IT™ Advanced Connector (SAC) reached product readiness.
Unfortunately, our engagement in Asia did not bring the success we expected. Although many pre-Shibui-IT™ elements saw the light of day in the process, strategic considerations forced us to return to Europe in order to find a new lead customer for Shibui-IT™.
Picking up momentum and then came the pandemic…
In January 2019, kdm semi consulting GmbH publicly announced the successful development of its Shibui-IT™ Advanced Connector (SAC): a new extraction-transformation-loading (ETL) tool for transferring ERP and CRM from multiple and different sources into the Shibui-IT™ BI tool.
In July 2019, we signed a formal partnership agreement with XLCubed Limited / UK. The XLCubed Excel Add-In Software Suite was, according to our professional judgment, the perfect tool to convert our Shibui-IT™ datasets into user-friendly and quickly accessible charts or other types of data visualization. The user-friendly interface, ad-hoc analysis capabilities, and stunning visualizations were key to creating a unique Shibui-IT™ dashboard tool. And with the XLCubedWeb solution, any Shibui-IT™ report, chart or fact sheet could be securely published and displayed in all major web browsers and in an XL3 app with just a few clicks.
At the end of 2019, we closed in on signing a contract with our first lead customer in Europe. The potential alphaside customer was convinced of the Shibui-IT™ solution. First project plans were jointly drafted but the agreement was never signed because in early 2020 the first heralds of a global pandemic were visible and from March 2020 onwards the business world stood still. None of the potential Shibui-IT™ customers were able to meet in person and witness a demonstration of our product. The only and most meaningful activity we could muster during this time was the continuous improvement of the Shibui-IT™ SaaS solution.
Our first client
In early 2020, we were given the opportunity to present our Shibui-IT™ BI and SAC solution to a large German-speaking audience with the help of the prestigious Markt & Technik magazine. A comprehensive product overview I had written appeared in Markt & Technik’s December 2020 issue. Our successful foray into the world of commercial publishing prompted the production of a second Shibui-IT™ article soon thereafter; only this time we wanted to home in on English-speaking markets. The fruits of this labour, an article entitled “New-generation, comprehensive, business analysis tool,” was recently published by Electronics World in their Dec/Jan 2021 issue.
And in October 2020, the moment finally arrived. Despite the setbacks and disruptions caused by COVID-19 and with the energetic help of our business partner Juergen Dudda Consulting, a new Shibui-IT™ customer was found.
Our collaboration with this customer has already resulted in major breakthroughs. A Shibui-IT™ Opportunity Tracking Tool (SOT²) was developed to production readiness and released at the end of 2020. SOT² is a web-based opportunity tracking tool developed to complement the Shibui-IT™ system platform. Its main benefits are transactional capabilities to track and monitor each new opportunity or socket from the concept phase to the start of production, using Shibui-IT™ BI for detailed analytics. SOT², in brief, replaces expensive CRM solutions as well as manual and labor-intensive Excel solutions.
At this very moment, my team is working closely with our customer to make Shibui-IT™ the backbone of their business operations for years to come.
Our mission does not end here, however. One satisfied customer is a formidable start but we know – from decades of combined experience – that there are many other organizations out there, desperately waiting to do away with the old. If you are one of them, why not consider kdm semi consulting GmbH and Shibui-IT™ for your next strategic transformation?