PC- office productivity toolsNetwork Power-
Circa Q4 2001
In 1996, a local consulting company in Ottawa, was doing $6m per year in revenues with 28 consultants or $214,000 annually per employee. Netowk spending was $35k. By 2001, revenues were just over $20m with 42 employees or $476,000 per preson. Network spending was over $300k per year. Productivity was up by a factor of more than 2. Imagine what this did for their bottom line.
PC- office productivity tools
Network- 'everything' is shared
Web- reversing out the work to the client or customer or supplier
Personal Productivity Tools- merging personal and office
Example-- Home Builders
Today, with all due respect, the home building business is still a craft based endeavour which, if it were compared to the
computer industry, would still produce five function calculators that look like primitive World War II vintage Turing machines
(used for breaking Japanese and German codes)- big, clunky and expensive.
Ultimately, a home builder's web site will allow consumers to 'goggle' in to the site in three dimensions, to choose the model that
they want, the lot that they want and then to load up their shopping carts with the features they desire. As they make changes to
their design and add and subtract amenities, the calculator will tally and show them their costs.
Visa and Mastercard are moving upstream- their credit cards will be used for everything including buying a new car or buying a
home. There is a small but fast growing market for power cards that carry credit limits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But this home buying e-commerce transaction using a credit card is only the tip of the iceberg. In all probability, it is the
e-business applications that will have the most dramatic impacts on home building. Pre-authorized suppliers and sub-trades will
log on to the builder's web site to estimate the volume of work required and to bid on it. Critical Path Scheduling, based on just-in-time delivery, will be net based. Payments will flow business to business via e-payments. Municipal inspectors will log on to see when they are required for inspections. Municipalities will recognize that home builders are their clients. The number of separate subcontractors and trades will fall from 25 or 30 today to just 6 or 7.
If former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin in his early days as a construction boss in Sverdlovsk (1,000 miles east of Moscow)
could build five storey, wood frame apartment buildings in five days (albeit with a huge crew), surely we can learn to build
houses in 30 days or less at higher levels of quality, with fewer defects, higher margins for the industry and lower prices for
consumers.
The home builder will become a web site operator. Legal closings, land registry documentation, mortgage financings … all will
be web enabled.
Copyright. Hickling Capital Corporation and Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada. October 2001.