BUSINESS BITS

Reforms that work
MICHELLE AVELINO

Even for Accent Micro Products Inc. (AMPI), which has been in the business for 12 years, keeping up with the fast-paced IT retail industry has been no walk in the park. Indeed, the company incurred considerable losses during its first eight years of operation. “This was until the company’s directors decided in 2004 to bring us kids in,” recalls Sharlene G. Yu, now AMPI’s vice president for administration and operations.

The “kids” she is referring to are herself, her partner Frederick Yu, who is now the general manager, and Stephen Yu, who used to be AMPI’s president. The three of them focused on “people and process” in their mission to reform the company. “The first thing we did was to look at the people in the company,” says Sharlene.

Examining why its people were not performing at a par with the company’s standards, they discovered that this was because the managers were too far detached from the storefronts. “All the while, the managers were giving us reports that everything was ‘Okay’ when it really wasn’t,” she explains. To bridge this gap between the managers and staff, the new management team established stronger and more effective channels of communication between the company’s head office and its various branches.

Stephen Yu in particular, who was then the president, did lots of hands-on work assisting branch managers to achieve their sales targets. Recalls Sharlene: “There were even times when Stephen would take his own car, grab some stuff from the stockroom, and make deliveries to clients himself to help a branch hit its sales quota.”

Aware that sales is the driving force of any company’s growth in the highly competitive IT retail industry, the management team taught branch managers how to run their business, talked to all of the company’s salesmen, and built friendships with the rest of the company’s staff. As a result of these efforts and because of the additional branches the team had put up, AMPI experienced a 50-percent sales growth during Sharlene’s second year in the company.

Today, AMPI has kept its lead as an authorized reseller of desktops, laptops, electronics gadgets, and cameras. It now has a total of 16 branches, 13 of them in Metro Manila and one each in Cebu City, Sta. Rosa (Laguna), and City of San Fernando (Pampanga). Its 16 partner-suppliers include the biggest names in IT today, such as Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and Nokia. The strong business relationship they have cultivated with Shoemart also provides them the edge in mall presence.

For 2008, AMPI’s goal is to add 10 more stores to its retail network, three of them in Cebu. This expansion program will be complemented by a calibrated shift in company operations that will relieve the head office of administrative tasks. The company is also working on two fronts to strengthen its industry position: first, it is standardizing the look of its stores and the products that they carry, and second, it is streamlining its backroom operations.

Perlas P. Albino, AMPI’s assistant vice president for finance, explains that when she joined the company last year, most of the company’s backroom processes were being executed manually. To obtain the desired report formats, the customized program they were using in their head office and in their stores required them to extract raw data from the system, export this to MS Excel, and then manipulate the data manually.

According to Sharlene, this system was adequate when AMPI was operating only a few stores and dealt only with relatively small inventories. With AMPI’s growth and expansion, however, the management team doubted that the system would still be up to the task. It was for this reason that AMPI, under the guidance of IT consultants from Raffles Solutions, decided to shift to Microsoft Dynamics for its backroom operations.

Albino says that Microsoft Dynamics has a definite advantage over other systems because of its more powerful item tracking capability. It would allow the company to trace the movement of every item from sales to service. “Wherever the item goes, whatever happens to it, we will be able to track it,” she says.

In addition, the relative ease of toggling from Excel to Microsoft Dynamics guarantees that data migration from AMPI’s in-house system to the Microsoft Dynamics system would be carried out smoothly. Albino points out that although the new system would not entail additional manpower in their backroom, it would provide critical and timely financial data on a continuing basis, thus greatly improving management decision-making.

Sharlene explains how important those sales reports and inventory statistics are to the company’s day-to-day performance: “We have to keep ourselves very flexible in the IT retail business because of the fact that our products are exactly the same as what our rivals are selling. For instance, we need to know right away when they drop prices so we can respond to it immediately.”

Indeed, now that all of its branches are linked online with the head office, AMPI can now react promptly and decisively to whatever swings the market may take on any given day.