Smart frogs ….

Today is my keynote at the SAP Business forum … with the key message being that it is the “smart frogs” who are continuing to streamline and re-engineer their internal and external processes using the ‘Net. These organizations, who are the true success stories of the 21st century, have realized that what has come together in the last decade are a wide variety of technologies and systems that permit rapid advances in business strategy. I’ll outline tons of examples of smart frogs.

The SAP event today is but one of many such events I’ve done Read on.

For example, Coles Myer (Australia) is investing $650 million in its supply chain through the next five years, which includes $351 million capital spending, and $315 million in systems and software; they’ll consolidate some 600 applications and 4,500 interfaces. All this to improve the efficiency of the manner by which they do transactions with their suppliers.

I’ll talk about Southwire – a building wire and utility cable provider – which has a customized customer portal that includes pricing, ordering, delivery/order status and online orders — which is now seeing online transactions totalling $200 million, up from $14 million in 2000. They’re business re-engineering their customer relationship, to obvious advantage.

I’ll also talk about AVIS, which in an innovative self-service move, allows you to look up details of your rental contract transaction online — such that they now see that while it costs $7 for a typical call center call, or $2.25 when the Internet is used with human intervention to provide this information — it costs but $0.50 through this online automated self-service.

And I’ll talk about Malee Sampran Plc of Thailand, a food grower / processor which is using handhelds, GIS and GPS to track farm produce. The information feeds into their “FoodTrace” and “ShipTrace” systems, and their business strategies for the use of this technology includes yield management and supply chain management.

Smart frogs are busy exploitiing the opportunity in front of them. Dumb frogs still think that it is the year 2000, and that the dot.com collapse has meant that the Internet was just a joke.

Back in 1999, I wrote in one of my books the following, which is a point that many should ponder today:

Even as a media circus claims the public’s attention over the crash of high-flying Internet stocks, smart business executives will continue to embrace the Internet, and will integrate it into everything they do. After all, they will recognize the real opportunities and challenges of the Internet such as we have described in this book.

Over time, the Internet will insinuate itself into every industry, and will become a core part of the way in which a company does business.

What will differentiate the successful from the unsuccessful organization? The former will be those who clearly and unequivocally outline how they hope to use the technology, business practices, and opportunity of the Internet to help in the achievement of the business objectives of the organization in the short, medium and longer term

Right on. Squish.