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Whole Sale Tour Application
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Case Study 1 ::
Case Study 2
Case Study 3
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Art Pennington:
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Thanks for making time to talk with me Roger. |
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Roger Ross:
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My pleasure Art. Anything I can do to help communicate your amazing concept. I know it’s helped my customers get results far beyond their expectations. |
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Art Pennington:
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I am very glad it is delivering results for them. But you’ve been following something very similar to my Profit Method for a number of years, in some cases with remarkable results. When did you get started in the consulting business? |
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Roger Ross:
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It was back in 1993, almost 15 years ago. |
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Art Pennington:
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Did you adopt the Profit Method from the beginning or did the process kind of evolve in your mind? |
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Roger Ross:
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Well, believe it or not, it’s actually the way I was taught. The consultant I was working with at the time was using Magic. He had completed a large project for ABB Combustion Engineering and had great success. So, he introduced me to MAGIC, which I’ve been using since that time.
My mentor would design systems by going into a company and saying, “What’s your idea of the perfect system?” The parallels are really uncanny compared to the way the Profit Method works and the way he envisioned creating systems for customers. One of the things he always said was, “If a company’s going to invest in custom software, then the software should work the way the company works and not make the company change to fit the software.
We did a few projects together and then in 2000, I went out on my own. I just kept that same method of building systems. It’s really the only way I know. But it has been a win/win situation for both my customers and me.
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Art Pennington:
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So, you were taught right from the beginning, I know that, since then, you’ve had a number of successes with your software development efforts. Can you enumerate some of them? |
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Roger Ross:
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One of the first was a core system for the tour industry. The solution managed all aspects of tour operations, from working with the vendors, the hotels, land features, attractions, managing the room inventory for hotels, booking all information regarding the passengers, right through to the invoicing piece and accounts receivable. It had its own accounts receivable module, which interfaced with an accounting system for the accounts payable. It even managed cruises. |
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Art Pennington:
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That sounds like a lot of functionality. How many people were involved, and how long did it take to get the solution completed? |
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Roger Ross:
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There were three of us involved. It was probably a year before the system actually went into production. |
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Art Pennington:
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For the tour operators who used the solution, are you aware of any facts as far as how it affected their performance or the business benefit of the software? |
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Roger Ross:
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When they entered a booking or reservation in their old system it took 15 to 20 minutes. With the new solution, the same reservation could be booked in five minutes. |
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Art Pennington:
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That’s quite an improvement in productivity. |
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Roger Ross:
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That was one of the big changes. But now, they also had the ability to slice and dice their tours to view the information in different ways. In their old system, they were pretty much stuck with one view. We gave them the ability to go into a tour, look at the passengers, sort them in different orders, look at land features on a tour, view those in any order, show all the hotels, show all the attractions, etc. |
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Art Pennington:
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That’s a lot of information at their fingertips that they didn’t really have before. Were they able to apply this as a competitive advantage? |
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Roger Ross:
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Yes. The tour industry is comprised mainly of mom and pop shops. There were a few really big tour operators, but we were the first to actually develop a solution for the wholesale tour operator in a retail market so they could go out and shop. |
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Art Pennington:
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Do you have any idea of the total cost of development until the solution first went in production? |
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Roger Ross:
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It was about $50,000.00. |
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Art Pennington:
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A Profit Method assumption is that you can create software for one-tenth normal cost. That’s probably about right considering all the functionality you created. $50,000.00 for all that—quite remarkable!
Well, one of the principles of the Profit Method is that you create the software and it provides tremendous benefit from day one. But the secret is that you continue to use the software and continue to get those benefits on an annual basis, so it compounds itself. Now if you implemented a Profit Method project ten years ago and you’re still using it today, you’ve compounded the benefits of that throughout those ten years. And it looks like all these companies are still using the original solution.
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Roger Ross:
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Yes, they have all used these solutions for a number of years and accrued many benefits. One of the biggest, I think, is the fact that they have many years of information history in their database. That is invaluable for management decisions. |
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Art Pennington:
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Okay, Roger. Thanks for taking time to discuss your successes with the Profit Method. |
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Roger Ross:
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Anytime, thank you |
