Vitalograph

3 . Problem Definition and Objectives

Unlike many of the organisations taking advantage of the eBusiness Acceleration Fund program, Vitalograph’s requirement for an eBusiness solution wasn’t market driven to begin with. The main driver for adopting eBusiness and a suitable website was to provide technical support for distributors, staff and customers.

Product support had been provided, on an ad hoc basis, by Shane O’Neill, a member of the Research and Development team who supported the technical support manager in each of the three branches. Unfortunately, the level of support required was getting greater and greater to a point where O’Neill was unable to carry out his R&D role. “We weren’t making best use of his time or skills”, commented Gary Casey, R&D Manager in Ennis. O’Neill was receiving an increasing number of queries which often required answers immediately or within the hour thus disturbing his daily routine on an ongoing basis.

When received, these support queries were logged into a Microsoft Access database that had been built by Shane O’Neill. This gave the team a ready resource of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and answers to distribute to those requiring technical support. Unfortunately, with no website able to handle this type of dynamic data, there was no way of making it available to key audiences.

With upwards of 50% of O’Neill’s time being spent dealing with technical support issues it was decided that the process should become more electronic and self-service oriented, allowing R&D to focus on its job. Additionally, there was no corporate web strategy and no Irish web presence – each country had its own website but there was no corporate standard across all the sites. There was a UK based site for the group but this was a simple, static site with basic product information.

“Our main objective was to build a website that could support the business on an ongoing basis and, in the immediate term, provide technical support to our staff and distributors” commented Casey.

Other objectives included:

• Reduce impact of technical support on R&D – Casey wanted to cut down on disruption in development and reduce the need to have an R&D person on the phone.
• Work smarter – By utilising data that was held by the company already (i.e. the database of FAQs), the R&D department would be able to provide a similar level of support whilst not having their working day disrupted.
• Increase efficiency – By building a website from the bottom up, Vitalograph hoped to realise increases in efficiency. In the short term, this was focused on technical support but, in the future, if orders can be processed through the system, paperwork could be greatly reduced. The old processes weren’t broken but Vitalograph wanted to improve on those.
• Reduce costs – By making support information available on the website, Vitalograph would realise savings in both time and costs. In future, the plan would be for distributors to order online and for that order to be imported directly the organisation’s MRP system. A unit would only be built once an order was received and this would realise savings in stock holding.
• Create a single corporate web presence – The disparate websites didn’t have a standard corporate look and feel and were lacking in functionality.

4 . Decision

In May of 2000, Vitalograph was approached by Shannon Development regarding the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Acceleration Fund. At the time, the management team had created a steering committee to look at how the company might embrace eBusiness and the benefits it offered.

The team had started to consider the cost and implication (both in the immediate and long terms) of what could be done to facilitate this area of potential growth. The availability of the Acceleration Fund changed their thinking around what could be done. Without the grant, they would have progressed with an eBusiness project but it is likely that it would have been something far less ambitious.