Powerbar

by Henry Hirschel

Company Overview
Any entrepreneur, with an inspired idea planted in a receptive market and cultivated with dedication, can sprout a small company. To make that sprout grow into a large company, leading finally to an IPO, requires a supporting trellis of systems that will not only anticipate future growth but also make it happen. After participating in two start-up companies' IPOs - one a spectacular success and the other a failure - I learned the hard way that the supporting trellis must include a system that will truly "grow" the company.

My next venture was PowerBar, a rapidly growing company that needed new systems to gain control of and foster its burgeoning success. The central question seemed to be: "Was PowerBar willing to commit to and support a system that would indeed 'grow' the company?" Management explained that they saw PowerBar as a "high tech" company and were willing and able to invest in the leading edge of information technology to ensure that their vision of PowerBar as a large international company would become a reality.

I now had the mandate to put in place systems and hardware on which the company would grow and eventually go public. Before we delve into the systems PowerBar adopted, a brief company history bears examination.

PowerBar (www.powerbar.com) began with a great idea. Long-distance runner Brian Maxwell, ranked third worldwide in 1977, experienced indigestion and fatigue during long runs. He needed an easily-digestible food that would provide a quick boost of energy. He enlisted the aid of his girlfriend Jennifer, a nutrition and food science student at Berkeley. After months of homemade experiments they created a product which they sold to friends and fellow athletes from their kitchen door.

Brian, realizing his limitations, attempted to license the product to Quaker Oats in 1986 - and was rejected. Brian and Jennifer had to find financing. Quoting Shaw, Brian offered, "Progress is only made by unreasonable people," and committed his life savings of $60,000 to the project.

Now 12 years later, PowerBar is a multi-million dollar company producing several hundred thousand bars a day for sale worldwide. PowerBar, though still a small company, is expanding from a strictly athletic-shop item to compete on the supermarket shelves. To keep pace with their phenomenal growth, PowerBar needed strong systems and big company smarts.

Energy Boost!
To improve a system you first must evaluate what the tasks are and how well the current system performs them. My team consisted of a small, talented group of young MIS people who had purchased a $1,000 off-the-shelf accounting package which they ran on a couple of PCs. I needed the vision and experience that only a big company in our industry would have, so I retained Deloitte & Touche (www.us.deloitte.com) to do a systems analysis and to write an RFP for an enterprise-wide system.

How did I justify jumping from a $1,000 accounting package to a multi-million dollar system? Easily. First, PowerBar was experiencing 20% growth per year. We could not afford to wait to install a system that would foster this growth. In a one-day seminar we surveyed how leading-edge companies interacted with their business partners, customers, and suppliers. We also had to factor in the potential for immense change. PowerBar ships from not one but several distribution centers, introduces product line extensions, and runs special promotions. The system would need to be large and flexible enough to anticipate the unexpected.

We chose SSA because their enterprise-wide system had recently completed a re-engineering project, moving away from AS/400 to an open-environment client server. With SSA, however, we found in that 20% shortfall we did not have a way of producing the invoices and other documents that we sent to customers, suppliers and vendors. SSA had basic in-house reports but the customer and other external documents did not look right graphically (we could not display the PowerBar logo), nor did the documents always have complete, correct information.

SSA recommended Output Management (Confirm) with nearly 20 years experience in the automation of letters of credit. We chose Output Management for several reasons: first, it was an internationally installed product; second, the software was very user friendly; and finally, we were shown the product face-to-face rather than attempting an on-line demo.

PowerBar requires that our document software be flexible. The Output Management (Confirm) product fits this model in a very positive way. As PowerBar has grown its international sales, we have seen many of the benefits of this software. Exports out of the U.S. and imports into other nations require country-specific documents. Output Management provides these documents in the proper language and format. Most of all, Output Management is has a resource library of export documents on line to ensure that only current ones are used.

About the Author
Henry Hirschel specializes in applying information system technological and business process solutions to high growth entrepreneurial companies. Presently, Mr. Hirschel is the Director of Management Information Systems at PowerBar lnc. He holds an MBA in Accounting and Management and an MS in Education Psychology.

Reprinted from Electronic Commerce World, October 1998 Copyright 1998 by EDI WORLD, Inc.