Hubspan Teams with Customer on Massive Partner Migration
Posted by Brandon Dow on September 22, 2009
Our CEO has a mantra of ‘love your customers’- something as an Account Manager at Hubspan I try to do every day in some form. One of the great things about my gig is the opportunity to work with our customers closely as they try to resolve business process issues, especially when you are partnering with your customer and not just serving a “vendor” role.
Recently, I participated in a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) exercise for three days onsite at a Hubspan customer location. This customer is a Fortune 500 company with vast global supply chain operations. The company needs to move several hundred of its partners from an old legacy system with archaic hardware to a new document delivery service where Hubspan plays a significant role.
Not only is the supply chain global, but the partners have a seemingly infinite array of business processes, technical capabilities and legacy systems. The target completion date for this migration is the end of March – so this means moving dozens of partners a week over to the new system and the Hubspan network, which means a huge workload hit for our engineers and client services teams.
The big focus of our meeting was to get a combined process in place that made it as easy as possible for the partners to migrate and ensured that the switch could happen in a matter of hours and days, rather than weeks (which is still fast!!).
As an integral part of the new system’s architecture, I had an opportunity to provide feedback and ideas, including, “I think it’s time for lunch”. Ok, I did provivde some valuable visibility into some feature areas of the Hubspan integration platform the customer team was not all aware, especially our capabilities around identity management and security policies, and how we can federate and protect user names and passwords or other personal information across the integration process. We also discussed encryption and decryption and how Hubspan mediates between disparate security policies in the integration community.
By the end of the three days, we had a new process identified and an action plan to meet our 3/31/10 date. We have some big challenges, but I certainly appreciate the customer trusting Hubspan enough to invite us to participate in the VSM session. It is easy to show the customers the love when you are thought of as an integral part of a new solution.
In the bigger picture… I think this illustrates a common belief among the AMs at Hubspan… we realize we aren’t successful at a company unless our customers are shown the ‘love’ – and that takes the form of great communication, two-way trust and a high degree of competence. I will keep you posted on the efficacy of the new process and how the Massive Migration project unfolds.
Brandon at the client VSM giving his customers some “love” (or a sign that he loves rock n’ roll, we aren’t sure)
Tags: business process automation, file transfer, global supply chain, Hubspan, integration, Integration Platform, integration services, partner on-boarding, suppliers
No Comments »
No comments yet.