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Far from the mother ship: Managing remote workers
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December 09, 2002 (Computerworld) -- Recently, senior software engineer Wayne Showalter went to France on vacation from Ventana Medical Systems Inc. Normally, his absence would leave his boss, Anthony King, in a panic. "He's really the backbone of our operation, and when he goes on vacation, it's often been chaos," says King, director of software and engineering systems at the Tucson, Ariz.-based manufacturer of diagnostic instruments.
Sure enough, this year an issue arose that threatened to stop development cold, but King wasn't worried. From an Internet cafe in France, Showalter was able to log into the network, diagnose and fix the problem, and recompile the program.
"In the past, we'd have to shut down the program until he came back or fly him back to do it," King says. But because his group has been using a new Web-based tool to facilitate remote software development, King was able to solve the problem with minimal disruption of his software operation or Showalter's vacation.
Ever since the mid-'80s, when then-CIO Charlie Feld transformed Frito-Lay Inc.'s marketing field force with handheld computers, managing remote workers has been a challenge and an opportunity for IT. Today, with 37% of the workforce working remotely at least part time, according to Gartner Inc., IT leaders are wrestling with vaster distances, tighter time constraints and shrinking budgets in their efforts to manage remote employees and retain a unified corporate culture. But the challenge is being met by an abundance of tools and strategies.
"We do all our own development, and many of our developers work from home full or part time—some out of state," says King. To enable remote programming, he tried using the virtual private network (VPN) that keeps Ventana's field salespeople in touch. "But our applications are so large that it was very, very slow, almost to the point of not being functional," he says.
In February, he installed GoToMyPC from Expertcity Inc. in Santa Barbara, Calif. The Web-based technology downloads installer software to the PCs at Ventana. When a worker needs to connect remotely, he accesses the GoToMyPC Web site from any Internet-enabled PC, and the Web server initiates a connection to the PC in his office. Two layers of log-ins and passwords and 128-bit encryption ensure security, and once the user is in, the remote PC mimics his desktop.
"Whatever programs you have access to at work, you have," King explains. "It's very, very cool."
The system tracks users' online time—a feature that came in handy recently when the company's auditors wanted to know how King monitors remote workers. And it has been very economical, he says, with a one-time setup fee of about $1,500 and a monthly fee of $17.95 per seat for his 20 users.
GoToMyPC has taken the angst out of remote programming at Ventana, shortening development time by enabling developers to work from home, from the road or even while on vacation. "When we heard about this, we thought, 'It can't work as well as they say it does,' " King recalls. "But it does."
A Real-Time Field Force
At Crossmark Inc. in Dallas, Joe Crafton manages 9,500 full- and part-time field-based employees who provide sales, marketing and merchandising services to packaged goods companies nationwide. When Crossmark reps sell a new jam from The J.M. Smucker Co. to Cincinnati-based grocery giant The Kroger Co., they stock it in 2,400 stores, says Crafton, senior vice president of retail operations at Crossmark.
"Everybody has to be working off the same set of information, from the team leader to the retail rep," he explains. "Communication is the biggest challenge because communication drives speed to shelf."
This year, Crossmark has been breaking in a new, proprietary system to facilitate communication. SalesTrakNG uses Hewlett-Packard Co.'s ProLiant 8500 SQL clustered environment attached to a 7TB HP StorageWorks storage-area network.
Crossmark CIO Charlie Orndorff designed the application to be Web-based yet also run off-line. It uses the existing infrastructure and field reps' older PCs and also supports handhelds, laptops and interactive voice response systems (IVR). Orndorff also used an open, XML design to facilitate communication between Crossmark and its 900 customers. "We're an extension of their business process because they're [manufacturers] outsourcing their sales to us," Orndorff explains.
When a customer like Orrville, Ohio-based Smucker places a product with Kroger, the grocer sends information such as stock codes to Smucker, and that information funnels directly through Smucker's system to the Crossmark sales force with little or no human intervention.
SalesTrakNG keeps track of 3.5 million tasks at 130,000 retail outlets, Crafton says. Sales reps can print orders from the Web, work off-line on their laptops and report back online or via IVR. There's virtually no downtime, because if a laptop fails, the reps can access the Web from another device. Customer reports, which used to take up to a month, now go to customers' Web sites in real time. And sales rep training time has been cut from five days to one. "If you can navigate the Web, you can use this," Crafton says.
Ironically, Crafton had some trouble marketing the new system to his sales force. "Change an application, and you change the process," he explains. "When you get into this kind of change, you need to understand and overcome the work-arounds people have built in to get around the old system."
But over the past year, the improvements have made believers of field reps who used to view corporate data with skepticism, Crafton says. "Because they know the data is real and coming in fast, there's a lot more credibility," he says.
The Asian Connection
Bernard Chaus Inc., a clothing manufacturer in Manhattan, has remote offices in Hong Kong, Seoul and Taiwan that employ a total of 50 to 60 workers. "We use those offices as liaisons with our manufacturing facilities in a variety of Asian countries, so all our processes funnel through them," explains Ed Eskew, vice president of IT.
When Eskew came to Chaus, kludgy communications were costing the company time and money. There was no corporate e-mail connecting overseas offices. A very small frame-relay network provided access to the AS/400 enterprise application in Secaucus, N.J., he says, but for only about five users at "absurdly slow" data rates, at a cost of $150,000 per year. Because the clothing business is image-intensive, designers were faxing sketches, prints and other materials at enormous expense, and the images were often unclear.
All the markers (patterns from which piece goods are cut) were produced in the U.S. and sent via postal mail, costing more than $90,000 per year. And if a marker was defective, the process of mailing it back and forth until the problem was corrected took days. "Our challenge was to provide quick, safe, secure, cost-effective connectivity between those offices and our primary data center in Secaucus, N.J.," Eskew says.
The solution for Chaus was a VPN from Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. in Redwood City, Calif. The new network features VPN-1 Pro, VPN-1 SecuRemote and VPN-1 SecureClient for secure communications between the firm's U.S. and international offices.
The VPN enables the remote offices to connect directly to the AS/400 in Secaucus, which provides planning, production and transit information. It also sends corporate e-mail through a Microsoft Exchange server and provides a tunnel for other applications.
Now everyone on the VPN gets instant, accurate information, Eskew says. E-mails with crystal-clear attachments have replaced faxes and overnight packages and cut the time to get a marker to a factory from about a week to minutes. With a capital investment of $38,000 in hardware and monthly recurring expenses of about $3,300, Chaus saw a return on investment in 13 months, Eskew says.
The VPN has also increased corporate confidence in IT and brought cultural benefits, he says. "We see much more communication than before," Eskew explains. "Personal relationships develop, and people are more responsive. You get more commitment to get a task done for a person."
The challenges of managing remotely have never been greater, but with the multitude of tools and technologies available, managers needn't struggle. "People need to recognize that these [remote technology vendors] are experts at what they do," Eskew says. "I want my peers to know there is good technology out there if you don't resist and just let it work for you."
Melymuka is a Computerworld contributing writer. Contact her at kmelymuka@earthlink.net.
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