Porterhouse Limited

8 . Lessons Learned

The lessons learned by Porterhouse during the first phase of implementing the eBusiness solution include:

• The company should have done more market research e.g. an initial survey to know more about customers’ usage of the Internet and to check if they had the necessary equipment to use the Internet . A questionnaire was not sent out to customers in advance and would have been useful.
• It worked well starting with a small, manageable project i.e. placing only one area of the product range on the customer ordering system, rather than tackling more complex initiatives from the outset.
• Choosing the web design company carefully paid dividends and as a result Porterhouse did not have many bad experiences. The company realised that price is not the best determinant of quality as the company they chose was not the most expensive. QBIKS had the extra advantage of having experience of Porterhouse’s industry, which helped very much. QBIKS was also flexible enough to take on extra project work if required and organised many of the marketing requirements.
• In hindsight, Porterhouse believes it should have put more thought into the usernames for the shopping basket facility. These contained Os (the letter O) which users assumed were 0s (zeroes) and keyed in incorrectly. This caused much confusion until Porterhouse pointed it out in one of its mailshots.
• If Porterhouse had realised in advance the delay that was caused by resolving the domain name issue raised above, it would have given more priority to this issue and started working on it much earlier in the process.
• Now that the site is up and running, Porterhouse realises that it had not fully thought out the promotion of the site in advance. It is not simply a case of ‘build it and they will come’. A lot of work needs to be put into the promotion of a new website initiative to ensure a good adoption by customers. This may have resource implications for the future.

9 . Future Plans

Before Porterhouse plans any new initiatives for its eBusiness solution, it wants to consolidate its investment in the initial phase and ensure that it is working well and paying its way, possibly by more focus on marketing. Once the investment is consolidated, future plans may include:

• Adding extra products so that more that 50% of its products are on the web. The next candidate for addition would perhaps be Contract Furnishings.
• The possibility of e-procuring from suppliers.
• Although initially the website is targeted at existing customers, there is potential for the site to obtain new customers in the future.

10 . Conclusion

As an SME, Porterhouse has done extremely well in implementing the first phase of its eBusiness solution. The site is of a very high quality visually and the systems and processes work well and do what they are meant to do.

Further work needs to be done on improving the rate of adoption of customers using the website before Porterhouse can declare its eBusiness initiative to be an unqualified success. There is much opportunity ahead if sufficient marketing resource is applied, particularly to those 20% of customers that account for 80% of the value of the company’s orders.