Anne-Marie Keane: Teaming for Success

Software Magazine, April, 2001 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Staples' VP of B2B e-commerce says following a tight structure is key to staying on time and within budget.

Anne-Marie Keane is creative, a successful businesswoman, and she knows how to work with IT. She says that teamwork--leveraging the talent of both business and IT professionals--along with a tightly structured prioritization process were key to creating a successful B2B site for large customers at Staples Inc., an office-supply company headquartered in Framingham, Mass.

"Before I started working with IT, people warned me that it's difficult managing IT in terms of cost and time," says Keane, vice president of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce at Staples. "But, on the contrary, our team had such discipline in our approach that we hit our date, we hit our cost, and we consistently met our customers' needs. I can give all the credit to my team for having stuck to our process and malting it a success."

Keane has a business background, and since she joined Staples in 1992, she has held various positions in the company's marketing, merchandising, operations, strategy, and international organizations. From day one, she says, she has worked in a collaborative environment.

Checkpoints and Balances

Staples is a company that recognized the Web's relevance early on. Members from the business and IT groups jointly developed Staples.com, the office-supply giant's Web site that later became an independent business unit. They first established customer requirements and then looked at what technology and resources they needed to achieve them.

"We used this process to come up with a list of what we wanted to accomplish with this Web site. We also made a list for subsequent revisions," says Keane. "When we start working on revisions, we go through a phase of macro design and then have a checkpoint where we all get together."

The next step is a micro design followed by a checkpoint, then the design phase, another checkpoint, and then the testing phase. Because of this very tight structure, Keane says, the Staples team delivers projects on time and within budget.

Automating Channel Management

Based on this successful process, Keane steered the development of StaplesLink.com, a B2B site that provides large customers with inventory look-ups, real-time pricing, and order-status checking. StaplesLink also allows significant customization.

When customers asked for the ability to take Staple's content and load it into their system, Keane looked for a system that could handle online channel management. "We needed to find a way to scalably offer our content to customers," she says. "Our process was too time-consuming. We would take information from our catalog management system and then take pricing from our back-end system. Then we combined these two and someone in IT would format them the way the customer wanted."

Looking for technology that could automate this process, Keane says she came across a prototype that Trigo Technologies, Brisbane, Calif., had developed. According to Keane, Trigo's prototype came closer to what they needed to do than anything they had seen already in production.

"We agreed to work with Trigo and codevelop the system," says Keane. "We helped define the requirements needed for sending out a syndicated catalog. We have hundreds of customers, and a manual system is not scalable." So the challenge was, she says, "How do we automate this without increasing our staff, but increasing the volume of syndication we offer to our customers? Trigo helped us to schedule it without human intervention."

Customers are happy, according to Keane, because StaplesLink lets them improve their ordering efficiency, thereby lowering their overall costs.

Keane has been working for Staples building the contract Internet business for the past three years. "I love building something from nothing and seeing it grow very quickly," she says. "The whole team--business, creative, and IT--working together has made StaplesLink very successful."