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No man is an island and, in this day and age, no company is either. It is extremely rare for one organisation to own the entire value chain. Most commonly, there are several participants in the value chain, each contributing an element of the margin. In some senses, an organisation can be viewed in this respect too.
Tarn Technologies have developed technologies which allow the decomposition of processes and the simplification of a problem into manageable pieces. We refer to this as baby steps and knitting. The same technology can be used to build collaboration between companies.
In a previous existence this technology was used to build a hybrid solution which generated revenue from the sale of extended warranty. This solution was, other than the provision of the customer data, entirely externally situated. Data was extracted from the customer files and delivered to a mailing house. Extended Warranty letters were then sent to households. The return address was to a call centre which encoded the responses. This data was passed back to the client who subsequently sent it on, via the process management technology, to a bank where standing orders were created. On successful establishment of the payment a message was sent back to the client. This triggered a further message to the mailing house which delivered the extended warranty certificate to the customer. Secondary processes mopped up the non-responders until the opportunity for extended warranty had passed.
A number of benefits accrued from this approach. Primarily, no cost was incurred until a contract was created which meant a no-low cost implementation of the service. An unrecognised benefit was that, by centralising the process in one operation, it was remarkably quick to perform customer queries, reducing the call time to under one minute and the cost to less than one euro. Because the information was immediately to hand, instead of having to hunt through several systems and locate the point of breakdown, it was possible to identify the cause of the issue immediately. The consequence of this was to bring the company off the back foot and manage the relationship positively.
The same technology was then exploited to build other profitable low margin services including retail remote digital image printing and educational services. The transactional cost of operation was one tenth that of the client's ERP system, making it possible to create services that would otherwise have been unsustainable.
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