Yesterday Corp. is well past the start-up stage, but that doesn’t mean the growing pains are gone.
A move to the Internet economy, and the accompanying changes in the way the company approaches business, created new headaches for President Tom Sincharge. With four satellite offices and nearly a dozen additional sales reps scouring the country for prospects, it was an expensive logistical nightmare to fly everyone in for regular training and monthly sales meetings.
“We ran the numbers and it was crazy to think how much we were spending when we added up the costs for tickets, lodging and meals,” says Samantha J. Abraham, Yesterday’s human resources director. “And that doesn’t even include the amount of time I wasted on the phone trying to coordinate everyone’s departure times.”
Sincharge asked John C. Schraepfer, president of Technogenics Ltd., for help. Schraepfer had previously suggested ways for Yesterday to connect its remote sales reps to the company intranet, and this time suggested Yesterday consider videoconferencing.
Sincharge’s initial response was reluctance.
“I remember taking part in a videoconference with industry experts a few years ago and was less than impressed,” he says. “It looked like some really bad animation. It didn’t seem very effective or very professional.”
But a few years in technology time are like an eon in geologic time.
“Some of the teleconferencing stuff has really become pretty cool,” Schraepfer says. Conference calling usually isn’t good enough because “you don’t have the ability to read body language.”
In the early days, video imaging was relatively crude. The motion was jerky and the sound resembled a poorly dubbed foreign language film, in which the actor’s lips stopped moving two seconds before the sound finished. Today, Schraepfer says, the sound and action can be produced as clearly as a live television program.
The technology has become pretty sophisticated, with voice tracking cameras and fully duplexed conversation. As recently as only a few years ago, people needed to take turns speaking. It was more like a walkie-talkie than a conversation.
For Sincharge’s company, the question wasn’t whether it should do video conferencing, but how it would best be accomplished. If Yesterday installed a middle-of-the-road system in each of its satellite offices, Schraepfer says the company would need ISDN lines to achieve the full-motion video quality. Traditional phone lines just don’t have enough bandwidth to carry that kind of data.
“The return on investment is pretty quick for a company the right size,” Schraepfer says. In addition to meetings, companies can interview prospective employees and hold virtual training sessions.
For the roaming sales reps, there’s the option of using video conferencing services offered by major hotel chains. That brings many economic advantages, Schraepfer says.
“You rent the service for a couple of hours, save yourself money and get the job done on top of it.”
Or, there is the off-the-shelf solution: Purchase several mini cameras, which can be mounted on the top of a computer. With the proper software, you can have meetings with several people at one time. The sound and video quality is usually less impressive, but it gets the job done.
Depending on how you wanted to equip your offices, Schraepfer says, to connect five offices you could spend $1,500 to $150,000.
How to reach: Technogenics Ltd., (216) 426-0150
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor at SBN.
