In with the new: Mike McNeall wants to bring a dramatic new business model to the technology side of the beer business

Modern Brewery Age, Sept 9, 2002 by Mike McNeall

Mike McNeall is the new president and CEO of DCI, the long-time beer industry computer software vendor. The company has a long history in the beverage industry. It was founded in 1977, and was acquired by William Scheff in the early 1980s. The company produced DOS business solutions for the beverage industry, and grew to a level of about 150 customers, when it began to shift its software to a more Windows-friendly environment. In recent years, v.p. Mark Frund helped the company move to a Citrix environment for client-server applications. At that point. Mike McNeall came into the picture. A former applications engineer and marketing exec for Sprint, he has acquired DCI, and brought in software that he had developed for another company. Some things will change at DCI-long-time CEO Bill Scheff has retired--but other things will remain the same-most other personnel will remain on board through the ongoing revamp. We talk with new CEO Mike McNeall about his plans for DCI.

You seem to be shaking things up at DCI...

Mike McNeall: We're going to keep our group intact, we're not firing anybody but we will be restructuring the entire corporation. We'll be restructuring management; restructuring the way we use technology and restructuring the industry. We're turning around the way the business model works for this industry.

What does that involove? This restructuring of the business model?

A lot of times, software companies think they know what they are developing. They may talk to customers, but these companies may develop what they want to develop anyway. We are going to change that. We are setting up customer forums outside DCI. We're not in control of the forums. You don't have to a customer of ours to be a part of the forum. Those forums will drive 100% of what we do in development. This is new to this industry. We will follow their lead--their priorities, and their enhancements. They will drive what our developers work on. We will give them time estimates, according to what they ask for, and we will be responsible to meet those time estimates. We will have multiple forums. If a customer does pre-sell, that different from peddle sell. If they do both, they can sit on both. We'll have a Bud forum, and a Coors forum and a Miller forum. We will help set up internet connections, and we will sponsor meeting. Within six months, they will elect their own boards, and become autonomous. They will c ome up with a consensus in the forum, and they will give us a project sheet to work from.

What is the incentive to join the forum?

Customers love to be able to give input. Let me give you an example. DCI had developed a Pocketman system, spending $100,000 to do it. When I came in, I talked to customers about it, and realized it wasn't working for them. We canned it, and started over. We created a forum for our customers, and three months later, we have the product they really want. Customers want to be included, and this gives them the opportunity. It gives them the power to drive solutions.

By the way, the user forums will not just be for us. They are independent forums, and all the information that is generated will be available to our competitors. We will have a blueprint from the forum, but we will share that with our competitors, so we will all have the same blue print to look at.

Has this model been employed elsewhere?

This is a model that we have employed in the manufacturing industry. It worked very well. The hardest part of it is getting the customers all on board. They are not used to having this much power.

Can this lead you into blind alleys? For example, if you have people in your forum making unrealistic requests for their software?

No, not really. We have three million lines of code, and they are totally web-centric. They are modules, not developed according to old technology. We follow UNI, which is where everyone is going, including Microsoft. The core codes that run applications are already built. It's also database independent, so we are no longer tied to an older technology. That gives us power. We can reach into a mainframe file in an AS/400, or a Microsoft database, bring it back to one screen, and push it all back to separate storage files. With this technology, we can go in, a module at a time, and we can replace a competitor's module, or replace one of our own.

When people do an upgrade today, you typically require the customer to learn everything all over again, A to Z. Everything has a different screen, and you put the customer in a state of flux. With our system, we can go in with a new accounting system. We can put accounts receivable into place by itself, and integrate it with everything that is already there. We can train that group specifically on their job. We get them trained, and feeling comfortable and the software in place before we move to the next group.

What would you say is the big difference with this new approach?

Currently everyone's applications aren't broken into modules. To get the data for the new migrations, you have to do an upgrade of a whole system, you can't just pick and choose which piece you want. This has been done with hand-held solutions, but not with the the actual core system. Most accounting systems, you have to replace the entire system--you can't do it one piece at a time.