Keating’s company, Prism Visual Software,
specializes in the development of fleet route management software. Its suite of
fleet management software is used by industries that routinely deliver product
or service equipment. By 1985, Keating had a vision for how to best serve the
unique needs of her customers. Her goal was to find a core accounting software
application that would enable full customization to fit the diverse needs of
her clients. With this approach, Prism would be able to meet the precise needs
of its clients, while providing a great source of recurring revenues for the
future.
With this strategy in mind, Keating reviewed a
variety of accounting packages. Her conclusion was that the product from
AccountMate Software offered her the best opportunity to provide her clients
with quick and effective modifications, as well as a foundation for the
vertical applications that would achieve great success down the road.
Staying Ahead of the Market: The Birth of
WaterMate
With AccountMate products serving as the
cornerstone of their consulting business, Keating and her colleagues set out to
write a vertical operational package that would be designed to serve specific
industry needs. They already had a competitive advantage… they knew that their
competitors had all made the mistake of offering operational software without a
tie -in to accounting. This forced users to purchase two different packages –
one for operations and one for accounting. This void in the marketplace created
a perfect opportunity to start with an excellent, off-the-shelf accounting
package and add an operational module. According to Keating, “It made perfect
sense to us then and over the long haul it has proved to make sense to our
customers as well.”
In 1990, the vision came to fruition. Prism was
contracted by a bottled water delivery company to design an operational module
for routing and scheduling of deliveries. Their plan was to integrate their
operational module with AccountMate’s Professional 4.0 Accounts Receivable
module. The resulting DOS-based program was copyrighted as WaterMate4. A
little encouragement from Ben Tse didn’t hurt. “When I visited AccountMate
shortly after writing this module, Ben said to me, ‘Lorraine, it is my dream
that you and the other resellers will write these vertical packages – you’ll be
bigger than AccountMate.’ This level of encouragement from the president of the
company meant so much to me, and that level of partnership still exists today… 15 years after our
first encounter,” claimed Keating.
Prism’s Strategy for Success – Market-to-Market
and Market-Within-Market
Originally, Prism’s Routing and Scheduling
Module was written for the bottled water industry, but that turned out to be
just one element of a much larger picture. “Having sold to many bottled water
companies, I became aware that all of these companies also had a need for an
equipment maintenance component since they all rented water coolers to their
customers and then had to service them whenever they broke down. To fulfill
this need, we expanded the delivery package to include service maintenance
functionality,” said Keating. This expansion of the core functionality of the product
was a precursor of a new direction for Keating and her staff.
In 1995, after WaterMate4 was rewritten for the
Windows platform, it was renamed as Visual WaterMate. This new “Visual”
product also was the first stage of a visionary strategy of making small,
incremental changes to their product, resulting in one comprehensive Routing
and Scheduling Management software package. This strategy was aptly named Market-to-Market
and Market-Within-Market. Employing this strategy, Prism has been
able to effectively meet the needs of a diverse array of industries that have
much in common, albeit with unique characteristics.
The first release of Visual WaterMate included a
major functional enhancement. According to Keating, “at a national trade show,
a bottled water company representative came up to me and said that his company
was primarily an OCS (Office Coffee Service) but also delivered bottled water.
He needed everything our program offered, except that the pricing requirements
for the coffee service part of his business was more complex than either Visual
AccountMate or Visual WaterMate could accommodate. By writing an Enhanced
Pricing component into both the Visual WaterMate and Visual AccountMate
packages, we not only won him as a customer, but opened up the door to all
coffee, food and beverage delivery companies.”
The product’s fast-growing niche market began to
include equipment repair companies, but there was an increasing need to expand
its functionality further to handle contract maintenance for warranty, service
and preventive maintenance. To fulfill this requirement, Keating and her staff
programmed Visual WaterMate to track labor and parts expended under each type
of contract. “We added a contract maintenance component to track warranty,
service, preventive and time block contracts on equipment. With this
enhancement we have sold to a wide variety of equipment service companies;
including network integrators, water and air filtration, glass installation,
telephone installation, carpet installation, and cleaning maintenance
companies,” said Keating.
The culmination of the Market-to-Market and
Market-Within-Market strategy was the diversification of the core
product Visual WaterMate program (for Windows NT and MS SQL) into a
“VisualMate” suite of three primary software products:
Visual WaterMate– for the bottled water and water treatment industries
Visual BeverageMate– for the soft drink, juice, dairy and food
distribution industries
Visual ServiceMate– for the equipment repair and service industries,
including network integration, telephone installation, glass and air filter
maintenance, cleaning maintenance and HVAC. Visual ServiceMate integrates
optionally with Texas-based Accu-Tech’s Visual Job Cost module.
Success Keeps Growing
The “VisualMate” suite of products was awarded
the Best Vertical Application award from AccountMate Software in 1998 at its annual Business
Partner Conference in northern California. In addition, their Visual
WaterMate product has been honored with both editorial mention and
full-length articles in Water Quality Products (WQA), Water
Technology and Vending Times magazine. The package has achieved the
singular success of having been sold to Central Coca Cola’s water delivery
division (they now have 15 installations). It is also used in several of the
retail locations of one of the largest water treatment companies in the world,
Kinetico. Their other customers include Poland Springs’ Georgia Crown, many of the largest Culligan
dealerships in the U.S, and Hellenbrand and Schaefer Water Centers. Visual
BeverageMate is successfully implemented in Evans Quality Coffee and also Linco
Services, who deliver over 54,000 food products in several states.
Prism isn’t about to rest on their laurels; they
are about to release several new add-on products to expand their VisualMate
suite of routing and scheduling modules:
Mini-Mate is
a palm pilot add-on that loads the delivery tickets onto a palm pilot and
allows the driver to complete and invoice (printed copy) at the site of
delivery.
Visual Dispatcher is a visual calendar representation of the technic
ians and their tasks that can be clicked and dragged to any new date, time and
technician.
e-callin is
a module that allows customers using the VisualMate suite of routing products
to have an internet order taking component that they can access from their own
web page and have that information flow directly to their own database.
Currently, Prism is enjoying unprecedented
success with over 150 customers in over 40 U.S. states and Canada. The staff
has grown to seven full-time employees. Their direct sales are conducted via
industry-specific shows on the regional and national level, and by several
direct mail campaigns per year. They also sell through the AccountMate Business
Partner channel, with over fifty AccountMate Business Partners authorized to
resell and support their vertical products.
With revenues increasing rapidly, it appears
that Prism has found just the right formula for success. Presently, roughly 75%
of their sales revenue is from their vertical products, with the balance
derived from customization of VAM to fulfill the requirements for companies
operating in markets such as importing, real estate and service industries that
use time and billing.
Lorraine Keating and AccountMate continue to
march forward in sync. “We signed up as a reseller 15 years ago and we’ve never
regretted our decision. The coding has remained elegant as the software has
grown into a scalable enterprise-wide system across multiple platforms. After
all these years, we still enjoy a mutually beneficial and profitable
relationship with AccountMate. There’s no reason to think that the next 15
years won’t be even better,” asserted Keating.
