4E

4e-2

Product Brief

4E helps manufacturing companies (discreet, process, and others) to connect organization goals and performances with day-to-day activities at every level - man, method, material, and machines

4E integrates Policy Management and Daily Works Management for its customers. The targets and actuals of organizational performance, efficiency, and throughput are percolated down from top to bottom, and actuals against those targets are recorded as least as possible human-intensive way.

4E helps organizations identify abnormalities/anomalies in the actual performance against a target or practical limits and further assists them in recording and following through on an action plan to prevent such abnormality from recurring.

4E integrates with the organizations' data systems as feasible and needed to ensure the actual performance data is recorded into the system against a target at as high frequency as possible and as least as possible human intervention.

4E enables organizations to identify and act on areas of performance that need attention as quickly as on an hourly basis and, if required, on a shift, day, week, or monthly basis.

Read more..

4esoftware.com

The Start

The Client provided the initial vision and details on how it is achieved currently - using excel and printed charts. We visited certain manufacturing companies to see how and what current methods are applied to the group and what level of recency and granularity is achieved in Daily Works Management.

The Client requested us to not only do the conceptualization, product management, product development, and delivery but also build the end-to-end capability of sales enablement - CRM, funnel management, demonstrations, and proposals. The Client wished to lead the introductions and initial sales and leave the product demonstration and closure of sales to us, with their participation as needed.

First 30 days of our engagement

We identified the first three customers of the product as introduced to us by the Client. One of the three customers volunteered continuously, and on-demand participated in demos and user interviews while the product was being conceptualized and built.

We created visual prototypes of the product targeting executive leadership, supervisors, and staff as user personas. We presented the same to the first three potential customers and gathered their input.

At the end of the first thirty days, we created a User Journey Map for 4 personas, which exhibited their journey from their involvement in the collection of essential raw data until making decisions thereof, basis their own KPI actual performance.

Our Collective Success

In the first six months, we launched the product's MVP and marketing website.

In the first nine months, we started the rollout of the first paying customer.

In the first year, we certified the product for data and information security standards of one of the largest manufacturing companies in the automotive space in India.

In the first six months post-launch of the MVP, we created a sales pipeline of 40 customers in collaboration with the Client.

Our Learning

Large sales and rollout cycles are challenging for a B2B SaaS product and profoundly impact the pricing strategy.

Enterprise B2B SaaS products shall undergo a higher initial investment to architect and design the software for customizations related to an enterprise. In our case, we tried hard for the user interface not to change much for each new customer, although the backend, third-party integrations, and data structures were highly extensible. This led to long sales and adoption cycles, with repeated negotiations on the cost of customizations.

Mandate products - where the executive leader has to mandate the adoption across the organization and show visible leadership at every step, have a fair chance of missing adoption even after a successful sale.