Foreign Connections

Foreign Connections
Notebook computer users trying to use their modems from hotel rooms in foreign countries find myriad sockets to plug into, and rules that vary from country to country. But users can get connected from anywhere fast if they know how.

Texas Instruments Inc. teaches how, in a one- day "road warrior" course it offers its employees. "We make sure our people, before they leave their offices on a trip, take the right telephone adapter and the right power adapter, and that they know the number of the internal service they're going to have to dial into," says Ken Rempert, executive support services manager for the Dallas-based company. "We recommend that you dial into the service long distance from your office before you leave," adds Rempert. "That way, you know you're going to be able to connect when you get over there."

Each employee taking the course receives the Executive TeleKit, a collection of gadgets, testers, adapters, and tools that can get your laptop connected to the Internet from anywhere. The kit is available for $105 from TeleAdapt Inc., in San Jose, Calif. (www.teleadapt.com). Similar kinds of products are also available from Road Warrior International (www. warrior.com).

----------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Options Made Easy
With companies offering stock options to more and more employees, and with options receiving increasing regulatory scrutiny, plan administrators are seeking help from specialized software.

Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc., a medical device manufacturer, is using Express Options for Windows from Corporate Management Solutions Inc. (based in Shelton, Conn.; www.cmsoptions.com) to track stock options that have been granted to 2,500 employees. "We use it for all the record keeping," says shareholder relations supervisor Charlene Anderson. "We have three people using the software, and it provides information to about 80 payroll departments around the world, as well as to finance people, tax departments, and other finance areas."

The software, which costs $14,995 for an unlimited user license, automates record- keeping functions and processes a variety of exercises, including cash, cashless, stock appreciation rights, and stock swaps. It enforces compliance with all SEC, IRS, and FASB regulations. A new version of the software permits employees to access their stock-option portfolios over the Internet.

The major competitor is ShareData Inc. (www.sharedata.com), which offers Equity Edge for a starting price of $8,000. The two vendors leapfrog each other in adding features to their software; shoppers should seek quotes from both.

----------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Your Own Web Stand
More and more research is confirming the value of a Web site in boosting sales. Even consumers who don't buy anything on a site may use it to get product information before they make a purchase at the local mall.

If you'd like to put up an E-commerce site on the Web but are frightened off by $100,000- plus prices of E-commerce software and related services from giants like Netscape, Microsoft, and IBM, then consider low-cost ($1,000 to $5,000) packages from companies like iCat Corp. (www.icat.com) or Intershop Communications Inc. (www.intershop.com). The low-cost packages don't have the enterprise scalability or the dynamic integration with accounting, manufacturing, and inventory systems that the high-end packages have, but they do let you display your product catalog on the Internet and allow customers to place orders.

Blooming Cookies Catalog Co., a cookie and gift supplier in Atlanta, has set up a Web site using Inex Commerce, a $1,000 E-commerce software package from Inex Corp. (www.inex.com). With consulting and marketing fees, the total implementation cost was close to $50,000. "Our average Internet order is $45, a little higher than an average phone order," says CEO Ann King. "Within five years, the Internet will be our major source of revenue."

In fact, a major cost of implementing an E- commerce Web site is the marketing effort to tell people about it, according to Erica Rugullies, analyst at Giga Information Group. "It can be inexpensive to put up a store," she says, "but it costs a lot to drive traffic to the site."

----------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Who's Keeping Score?
Software vendors are hopping on a management bandwagon

Six years ago, Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced the balanced scorecard, a management system for linking the strategic objectives of a firm to four flavors of performance metric: financial, process, customer, and learning (see "Closing the Strategy Gap," CFO, October 1996). Companies soon discovered it was no little task to keep score. Most still rely on labor-intensive ways of collecting and analyzing the necessary data, much of which resides in numerous separate computer systems. (One Canadian bank reportedly has more than 4,000 users on a paper-based scorecard system.)

But also in the early 1990s, several trends were starting that would make automating the scorecard feasible. One was the advent of data warehouses; another was the spread of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Decision-support and OLAP (online analytic processing) tools became more powerful and user friendly. Groupware, such as Lotus Notes, and Internet technologies emerged to enable the rapid distribution of scorecards to the desktop.

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