娇色导航

Hi everybody, welcome to DEMO, the show where companies come in and they show us their latest products and services. Today, I'm joined by Tom Shoemaker. He is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Propel. Welcome to the show, Tom. ?

Good to be here Keith. ?

So what are we seeing today? ?

Well, our company is called propel, and the application is also called propel, so that's what you're going to see today. ?

Get that a lot on the show. So in a nutshell, what kind of things are you doing with the propel software? ?

It's a solution around enterprise product collaboration. So we are for companies that make a physical product: Computer, a mouse, an MRI machine, anything that's a physical electronic or a med tech device, we can help. ?

Okay, so who is this then designed for? Does it cross the range of big companies, small companies, startups, they can use it, or just large enterprises? Who do you kind of target? ?

It really runs the gamut of emerging, those just entering a market with the product, mid-market, and then enterprise as well. ?

And then a typical user within a company would be a product designer, or is it somewhere else down the chain? ?

That's definitely one of the personas that we serve, but it very much is enterprise and that we really span. What we say is kind of the back office, the product folks, engineering, product management, quality and the front office folks, sales, marketing, service. ?

What would people be doing without this or, and what problems are you helping them solve? Let's start with that one. What problems are you helping them solve? Why should someone viewing this really kind of care? ?

The mission of our company, and of the objective of the software is to help these companies succeed with their products. So that means building the right product, delivering it to the right market, and ensuring that the customers that own the product are happy and enjoy it. ?

So without the this product in a customer's hand, would they be doing just Excel sheets, pen, pencils and paper, old-school drawings of their products? ?

So Excel is one of the more popular solutions, of course, but not purpose built for this. But between Excel, shared file folders, things like SharePoint or FTP, and good old-fashioned email, that makes up a lot of where we can come in and help. ?

So let's get right into the demo, let's see what you got here. ?

First I’m going to start off with a little bit of our hypothesis, if you will, and why we set off to build the product that we built. And that was this idea that I talked about the back office and the front office being somewhat disconnected.

We believe that, hey, we think those product teams are not necessarily talking to those commercial teams, those that build the product and those that sell and service the product. And we set off and did a lot of research and really validated that to be the case.

Just to elaborate a little bit, the product people, folks like engineering, quality and regulatory, and then the front office, people like sales and marketing and e-commerce, they tend to not know what the other is doing.

There's not a lot of communication going on, and that leaves a lot of money on the table, right? So if one hand knew what the other was doing, they're better able to extract that value.

And that really is the crux of what we do, we bring together those two different disparate sides of the coin, if you will, to help them close what we call the product value gap. Okay, all right, so this is our solution.

We've got something in it for everyone that's part of the enterprise, and I'm just going to take you through a couple different workflows, right? That kind of span, going back and forth from the back office to the front office and vice versa. ?

We don’t have a whole lot of time to grab everything, but show us the cool stuff. ?

All right, here we go. So we're going to start off playing the role of a maker of high-end remote controlled cars, we'll call Peak Design, and we sell these cars to elite hobbyist shops.

So this is an example, and in this first workflow, I'm going to play a role of a designer. I'm also going to play a role of a marketing person.

I'm playing the role here of the designer, and this might be what someone looks at, a Product Lifecycle Management view of the world, where they think about this car in terms of items and manufacturer parts and things I buy and things I make, and assemblies that come together to form a finished good, so that's what we're looking at here.

It's also important to note that this is very much a multi-disciplinary solution, to make this product and have it be successful, you need documentation, you need packaging, you need mechanical design components, you need electrical design components.

And we grab all that, we unify all those disparate sources of information to give you a complete representation of your product. ?

So companies might have this in all different locations, on their on their networks and systems, and they're just not exactly right. ?

Using many different sources that author, the data and many different sources that manage the data, we can unify all that, right? The other really important thing is products change over time, right?

So being able to marshal a product through a change management process where you need approvals, you need people to chime in, weigh in, because there's a lot of cost at risk.

So you need to have a very both rigid and flexible, depending on what kind of change you're talking about, change management process. And we can solve that very elegantly.

In this example, we have a pending change, and this is because the motor that we have in this high-end car doesn't perform as well as we like to, and we're getting some customer complaints.

So we started off on a change process, and we're going to go ahead and issue that change and marshal it through the change process.

Another thing that's important to note, when you're bringing a new product to market or a revised product, like we're doing in this case, does it comply with the regulations in the markets that you plan to sell it?

So we've got a compliance management component to our solution where we can provide all the evidence that the solution is right for the marketplace, right? It's got a REACH and RoHS Compliance and everything related to that, right? ?

Because the last thing you'd want is someone to come back to you after you've made all of these changes and then like, well, that's not compliant. We can’t sell it, it sits on the shipping dock, right? ? Exactly, right.

So we have all of all of that process as well baked into our solution, where you can take all of those component parts and understand the material composition of them and get all the certificates of compliance to prove you can sell this in the European market, which is what we're trying to do here.

Okay, then we switch over now and take the role of a marketing person, and this is where a lot of these historical solutions have fallen short. They do well on the back office side of it, sure, but they don't really accommodate.

Well, you make the world's best product, but if no one knows about it, if you're not prepping the channels in which you're going to sell it, to receive the product and promote it, you're not going to succeed. So that is what we do, and it's all linked up.

So we take that very technical representation that the engineer thinks about and transform it to the market-facing representation that marketing and e-commerce and sales think about. So that's exactly what we're doing here. We're deciding to take this product and go and enter into a new market.

So now we sort of switch over to the marketing role, and we say, Okay, I've got to take the way the mark the engineer talks about this, transform it to the way the marketing person talks about it, and write all the hero copy, write all the promotional copy, generate all the digital assets and provide them, and then equip all my channels, whether I'm selling it through hobbyist shops, like I am, yeah, or Amazon or Walmart or whatever, right?

?

This sounds like something that a marketing person would probably just have to send emails to the to the engineers, like, as they're coming up with the copy, they would have to be like, Oh, can you send me this? Or do you have this?

Or do you send me that? ?

In this case, I now have a question, okay, is this UL certified? I'm going to enter a new market. That's exactly what would happen historically, back and forth on emails.

Waiting for that to happen no longer, because it all happens in the system, okay, tied to the actual product, right? This new model, this remote control car that we're trying to enter into the marketplace.

So I'm going to launch a task, and this is part of that enterprise collaboration. This is now the marketer talking to the engineer, right in the one system all arrayed around the consistent view of that product information, right?

This doesn't happen today, so that's just a quick sample of what we can do as a way to help you introduce a new product, develop new product, and then introduce it into the marketplace. All right. All right. Doesn't end there, though. We've got another example here.

So in this case, now we're going to look at a couple of other departments, service and support, engineering and quality, ?

So now this is like, now the car is out in the market, right? ?

Cars out in the market, what happens to it? It breaks. It might break. Or someone may say, Hey, I've got an idea to make this product better.

Like a service technician who's responding to a work order and they're out looking at a hobbyist shop and responding to a customer complaint saying, Hey, I kind of like your cars, but the shock mounts, they're not replaceable. They're attached to the chassis.

So if they break I have to replace all chassis, maybe you make them as a replaceable item. And I, as the designer, I'm thinking, well, that's a great idea, because we can make spare parts, we can sell aftermarket parts, and we can, you know, generate more revenue.

So this is a service person logging a complaint and attaching the actual effected final good to this. So making that actually field replaceable units, so that the customer doesn't have to replace the whole chassis. This then goes to that same change that we're talking about.

And now engineering knows that, okay, I'm going to go ahead and do that. Furthermore, I'm going to provide all the documentation needed to the service technician, so going forward, if they have this situation, they can swap out those shock mounts.

Okay, yep, and I, as the product manager and the marketer, now have another revenue source right now. ?

And you could say, Okay, we've now got replaceable parts, so please buy more of these cars. ?

Exactly right, exactly right. And we bring in all of the revenue performance, so you can see how things are actually working out and market.

And we can then track, yep, the customer complaints and the quality issues, and see how that trends over Okay, all right, so that's just one more example of kind of crossing that value gap, sure, back and forth.

And then the last one I'll show you here, just take one minute. It doesn't always happen that you build a product to stock, to sit on a shelf. Sometimes the impetus for a new product comes from a prospect coming in, right like an engineer to order.

Type of scenario where the customer says, I kind of like your cars, but what if you gave me one with a better spoiler or more high-powered battery, for example. So in that case, we start with sales, application, engineering, and then it comes inbound to engineering and design.

That's exactly what we're doing here. We're starting with an opportunity that becomes a project. So this person comes in and says exactly that, I kind of like your cars, but I want you to custom build one for me. We can do that.

And what we do here is we now create a project that gets the team involved, gets the engineers involved, gets the product management team involved to see if they can respond to that customer request and decide, can I make that product at the margin that we desire and to the volume that the customer desires?

Again, all linked together, all in one platform, yeah. And in doing this, it's a very collaborative effort, and in this case, we rely on an outside supplier to help us do some work.

Okay, so what we're going to do is share part of our design, not the whole thing, only the part that we want a supplier to work on, and we carve off a piece of that product information and put it in a secure portal and allow the supplier to come in.

This is something that we do very uniquely. Doesn't require any IT intervention to set up this sort of special environment. We involve the supplier. We provide them only what they need. They do the work.

They send it off to us, and we continue and proceed on with our design. And here we've decided that, hey, this custom product was actually great.

There's a market for it, so we're going to add it to our product catalog, and we're going to create a new variant for this product, and we can now start to build this to stock and make more money out of this idea. ? This is great.

So is this an entire platform? Like, do customers grab the entire platform from you, or can they pick and choose what parts of the system they want. Because you gave me three different scenarios. ?

Absolutely, they can get the whole thing from us, but we are built in such a way that they can start anywhere. That they want to and grow into the any of the other areas that they need. ?

Does it take a lot of time to kind of set the companies up, you know, with their systems, or is it a pretty quick installation? ? It's pretty quick.

So it’s all completely cloud based, right? So the there's no real installation of the software. The key variable is, how much data do you have to begin with? Yeah, that you might want to move into the system, right?

And for new greenfield opportunities, or where they're coming from a place where they didn't have something, we get them up and running in three to four weeks.

And for those that have been using legacy products for decades, takes a little bit longer, but still, we've done very well to get people up and running in 13 to 14 weeks, moving all their historical data along as well. ?

I know you have a lot of other features of this product, again, I forced you only to do like three or four scenarios. So where can people go for more details on the software as well? Do you offer a free trial? ?

Propelsoftware.com, there's lots of great information on that site, but those that are interested we will absolutely set them up with a trial. ? All right.

Tom Shoemaker, thanks for joining us on the show. ? Thank you, Keith.

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All right, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Be sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel, add any thoughts you have below, join us every week for new episodes of DEMO. I'm Keith Shaw, thanks for watching.