Single point of contact is a longstanding concept in the technology industry and has now found its way into the ASP market.
But while a crop of ASP aggregators are just emerging to take advantage of the demand for one-stop hosting, Applicast has been a single point of contact for some time. Take, for example, its work with LifeSpring Home Nutrition.
The health food company had an aggressive national expansion plan to deliver its nutrient-enriched meals to people's doorsteps across the country. But along the way, it outgrew its home-grown financial system.
 ONE-STOP HOSTING--IT'S GOOD FOR YOU Kevin Duff (left) of Applicast didn't limit his involvement with Eric Bjerkholt's Lifespring to asimple liason between the health food company and its Web design firm. As a result, Applicast today finds itself a one-stop hosting shop for Lifespring's online payment-processing and customer-service needs. |
During the implementation, Kevin Duff, project manager at Applicast, became the liaison between LifeSpring, the design firm developing the company's Web site and the company handling LifeSpring's customer-service calls. Now Duff says he is working on a system that will feed meal delivery information and confirmations gathered from LifeSpring's distribution partners online into the back-end SAP applications.
"They provided us with all the expertise necessary to get things up and running and keep it running," says Eric Bjerkholt, CFO of LifeSpring, Richmond, Calif. "Otherwise, we would have had to hire an expert from the vendor, [as well as] significant in-house resources," he says.
The costs of hiring a consulting firm or taking the implementation in-house were also out of reach for the 37-employee company. Rather than having to pay consulting fees over a 12-month period, however, Applicast started hosting SAP for LifeSpring within three months.
Applicast's secret for rapid SAP implementations is a set of pre-configured templates for industry-specific business processes, called FastPack. Business solutions are designed by Applicast's staff. In the case of purchase orders, for example, Applicast has customized the SAP purchase-order process through the entire purchasing process, from creation and approval to verification and payment.
"Young companies that don't necessarily have processes in place can still make use of the processes and transactions we already have in our template, which allows for quicker implementations at a lower cost," Duff says.
LifeSpring is a prime example of Applicast's main clients,aggressive-growth start-ups that have little infrastructure in place and would rather outsource than build.
The company not only outsources its call-center, Web site and financial systems but also the manufacturing of its meals and stores its products in an off-site facility.
"We decided in the beginning to act as a virtual company by outsourcing anything that [can be outsourced]," Bjerkholt says.
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