What creative and innovative techniques did you adapt in the development of your product or service?what was the effect of the innovative techniques to the sales and profits of your business?
Answers
Great questions and thanks for the A2A!
About 4 years ago our company was really struggling to differentiate ourselves from the competition. We make inventory management software and the competition is INTENSE. We were running up against the giants in the industry like Microsoft, Oracle, Epicor as well as some big new players.
The best thing we ever did is to collect all of our phone, email, chat conversations with users and customers and to analyze them in extreme detail. From this we created a prioritized list of features that people were asking for Great questions and thanks for the A2A!
he most part everything that people were asking for was exactly what we had already built or where in the process of building. HOWEVER the #1 most requested feature was completely off our radar! This was because people were describing a very vague problem that nobody really knew how to describe. But when we combined all the data together it was staring us in the face.
The problem in a nutshell: even though people were using all kinds of sophisticated tools they were still having a fundamental problem answering the question: HOW MANY of WHAT do I have WHERE? Most of the tools focused on the HOW MANY and the WHAT but seemed to disregard the WHERE. Today we call this problem 'a lack of inventory visibility'.
We decided to tackle this problem head on and the more we focused on the WHERE, the more we realized that everybody was doing this whole inventory thing backwards! Instead of starting with product lists and quantities we should be starting with LOCATIONS.
How do you organize a set of locations? Well, we've known the answer to this for literally THOUSANDS of years - You use a MAP!
So we got cracking: