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Share your vision with staff For your eBusiness implementation to succeed, it’s critical that all the staff in your company are aware of, and involved in, your vision. Not only will you meet with less resistance internally if your employees are onboard from the beginning, but they will also be able to make valuable suggestions to improve your plans. Kenny’s Book Export Company in Galway ensured that its staff was involved from the initial stages of its eBusiness projects and was rewarded with excellent ideas from the shopfloor and few problems internally during the implementation stage.  Have Success Criteria in Mind There’s no point in having a vision without defining the way in which you intend to measure the successful delivery of that vision. How will you know when you’ve arrived? Not only will specific goals help keep your eBusiness project on target, they’ll also give you and the Project Team the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made it. Why deny yourself the pleasure? Case Study - Sigma Wireless Since the appointment of Joseph Moore as Managing Director in 1998, Sigma Wireless’s strategic direction has significantly changed. It’s important to understand a number of key changes that predated the eBusiness project and led to it being required. The company in 2002 is about the same size in terms of revenue as it was in 1998, but the business and product line has been totally transformed. Non-core businesses (e.g. mobile accessories and power supplies) have been exited. The company has moved from its focus on the Private Mobile Radio (PMR) segment to developing a 90% market share within the TETRA niche (new digital standard for radio communications) and are now looking to develop a similarly strong position in the emerging 3G segment (the forthcoming new generation of mobile phones). According to Joseph, the problem was that Sigma Wireless had become “A Jack of all trades and a master of none.” The new mission statement signalled the new and focused strategic intent: “To be a World Class designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative antenna and antenna-related product solutions, worldwide.” The vision statement underlines the ambition that drives the mission:"Double our business every two years." To achieve this kind of growth, it was critical for Sigma Wireless to align their internal capabilities to ensure sufficient business capacity. The first step in this process was kicking off the “Change to Compete” project. They employed a consulting firm who supplied four consultants to spend nine months working on a complete reengineering of all manufacturing processes. This involved all the manufacturing staff undertaking crosstraining and the development of a multi-skilled workforce. At the same time they embarked upon installing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software in order to integrate the key business processes and to build upon the success of the “Change to Compete” project. Both the “Change to Compete” and ERP projects were significant successes but the eBusiness project was designed to take the company further towards the realisation of their strategic objective of moving up the value chain into the solution business. In order to deliver ‘solutions’, they needed to offer engineering expertise at a much higher level. Joseph Moore commented as follows: “It’s not a matter of sending out a data sheet, offering a price and hoping customers select you. It’s a matter of being able to go in, identify customer’s problems, pick the right solution and deliver it.” This “customer intimacy” business model had been successfully demonstrated in a couple of key assignments. For example, Dolphin in the UK had contracted Sigma Wireless to supply 100% of its antennae. The key to success of this project had been close and deep liaison with the customer’s engineers in order to create a first class solution. Due to the improvements created by the “Change to Compete” project, Sigma Wireless had the manufacturing capacity to double output without increasing overheads. The challenge they faced was how to obtain a tenfold increase in customers without incurring a tenfold increase in sales and marketing and R&D costs. Traditionally the sales team would liaise with Sigma Wireless’s engineers in order to get solutions to customers problems. However, this was proving inefficient for two reasons:
The solution was to put in an effective system for knowledge gathering and management information and this was the objective of the eBusiness project. During the business planning process a number of critical success factors were established:
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