The Bloor Perspective: Net Wars, planning nightmares and half-baked ideas?

It seems a long time ago now that Freeserve launched its "free" UK Internet service, but actually it's less than 18 months. As well as boosting the UK Internet population by a half a million in a few months, it had the immediate effect of dethroning a complacent AOL.

This had the effect of a creating a little pricing spat, which really had little effect and did nothing to usurp Freeserve's position. Then all of a sudden Altavista threw the cat among the pigeons and announced a scheme to charge users a one-off fee of £30 to £50 and an annual fee of £10 to £20 in return for unmetered Internet access - which means that you could have your line open all the time.

Now however we have a price war on our hands. Excite.co.uk announced plans to launch a similar service before the end of the year. Freeserve immediately fell into line, saying that it would launch a "low cost" unmetered serviced, but not saying when or at what price - probably because it never had time to invent a scheme - it just had to respond.

Then cable operator NTL stepped up, guns blazing, and announced a similar package. Cheap suddenly got cheaper and Freeserve shares fell by nearly 20 per cent.
BT's response to this was typically slow and unimpressive - stating that it would launch a service that charged users £15.25 per month for unmetered access, but only on evenings and weekends - otherwise it is 1p per minute. Commentators like us have been hoping that a telco price war would erupt and now we have got what we wanted.

In the UK the telcos, and BT in particular, were competing in the most anodyne fashion imaginable - it was almost as if a happy cartel was in place. Those days have gone and BT is soon going to have to face the situation where its ability to milk captive revenue streams has died a death.

At last the UK population has affordable Internet access. Watch the rest of Europe follow suit and watch all the "old PTTs" start to suffer.

** ER what? **

Do you really know what your ERP system does?

Following a year long implementation, requirement and specification overhauls and finally the system going live, many people just don't know what the ERP system that they ended up with can do. IntelliCorp is attempting to assist SAP users with this problem through a product called myProcesses.com. The idea is to help organisations understand exactly what their SAP system does and how well it does it. A series of tools are provided to facilitate this - including LiveCapture which interrogates and produces a blueprint of the live R/3 system, and Process Analyser, which identifies possible areas of improvement in business processes.

IntelliCorp is tackling a problem that is endemic amongst ERP users in that systems are not revisited often enough after go live. In a typical implementation, much of the effort is expended on optimising the business processes that are critical at that moment in time. For other, lower priority processes, the system "default" is often used leading to vanilla functionality that just "does the job". The intention is usually to come back and optimise these areas later but this often gets forgotten as people get used to what's been implemented.

However if IntelliCorp's myProcesses.com initiative is effective, it could represent a far superior solution to the band of consultants, and may well deliver a lot of value.

**Beans in Bali **

You can't build a business selling beans to consumers over the Internet. Everyone knows this. Beans are very cheap, bulky and heavy, and consumers buy small quantities at a time. The cost of delivery is prohibitive and the global dimension of the Internet makes the proposition look even crazier. But try telling that to the people at Heinz.

Heinz Baked Beans is part of the fabric of British society. But if you are abroad it's nigh on impossible to get them -and boy do they, quite rightly, whinge about it. Heinz however had the bright idea of helping these poor souls.

To reach the ex-pats, a direct business model was necessary and the Internet was the obvious sales channel. Ex-pats represent one of the most geographically fragmented customer segments imaginable but tend to use the Internet to stay in touch with what's going on "back home".

Building and marketing the Web site was relatively easy. There were many specialist publications and Web sites for ex-pats that could be tapped into to get the word around about the new service. The difficult part was fulfilment but Heinz worked very closely with a long-standing business partner in this area, Diss Fulfilment, which handled everything from initial electronic order taking through to final picking and dispatch.

The Heinz project has demonstrated a couple of important things.

First, global delivery services are now cost effective enough to handle relatively low value items so fulfilment is much less of a barrier to entry.

Second, it is important to target specific market segments and really understanding their nature when moving to the Web. Global visibility is not the same as global appeal. To be successful, you must understand what you are trying to sell to whom, why they will buy it and how you are going to draw their attention to it.
In the meantime, Heinz now has the attention of a market segment. They might only break even selling them Baked Beans, but that attention is an asset that can now be exploited in all kinds of other ways.

For more analysis, see www.it-director.com