Remarkably Compelling! Yes, But What Is It?

Another corporate brochure in the mail from ‘Professional Advantage’ addressed to me, this time spruiking a 'remarkably compelling' product called ‘Infor SunSytems eXFM’.

Allow me to examine the sum of its parts.

‘Infor’ sounds like it’s an abbreviation of ‘Information’, but the usual word for that is ‘info’. Maybe it’s short for ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

‘SunSystems’. Now, I would accept ‘Sunsystems’ and ‘Sun Systems’, but not 'SunSystems'. Somewhere along the corporate way, back in the early 90’s I suggest, some arsehat with a marketing degree and a $1000 a day cocaine habit decided that putting title words together but retaining their capitalisation was a smart idea. PricewaterhouseCoopers is one such horror - actually they're even worse because arbitrarily, they drop the capital 'W'.

As for ‘eXFM’, well that’s not even a word; it looks more like my cat walked across the keyboard with the ‘Caps Lock’ key left on.

So what does this amazing product actually do? Dunno. I’ve read the brochure four times and the only hint is a mention of ‘timesheets’.

Features of the product they seem eager to impress upon me include:

• eProcurement (Does that mean I get email? Because I already have that.)
• ‘Self Service’ reporting (Does that mean I have to do my reports myself? If so, why would I want their product?)
• ‘Expense Mgmt’ (Would it kill them to add in the missing letters?), and
• ‘Functionality’ (Mentioned twice. I presume it means you can turn it on and off… whatever the hell it is.)

I ask again: Why can’t businesses talk like normal people? If they want to communicate their concepts to me, why don’t they start by using the English language as opposed to this part-gobbledygook and part-Klingon?

The free ‘strictly limited’ seminar is on the 20th November at Professional Advantage’s offices at 500 Collins St, Melbourne, and it includes a light breakfast.

I’d love to go but there’s some grass growing in my backyard and I feel compelled to watch it.

Heaven's Got A Place For Country Trash

I went into the big smoke yesterday. Gee, them skyscrapers are mighty big.

My day:

1. Visited a (business) supplier. I said, “You have given my company a credit limit of $2,000. That’s all well and good, except that our average order is $5,000, and therefore, the so-called ‘credit’ is meaningless. We’ve been giving you work and money for three years now, we’re fully up to day with our payments, and I demand that you stop this stupid ‘COD’ rubbish keeping in mind that … Umm, why are you crying?”

“Sorry, one of our staff members suicided, we’re all a bit shattered right now… now, what were you saying about credit?”

“Umm, it doesn’t matter. Sorry.”

2. Went to Nam Loong, one of those off-Chinatown joints that’s cheap, loud, crass, you have to share tables and the wait staff are rude as. For $8 I got the best meal I’ve had in months. In the stupid yuppy seaside tourist town I live, service comes with a smile but $8 won’t even get you an entrée. You don’t realise how lucky you are in cities for having access to such great cooking. The country may provide the produce, but the city provides the meals.

3. For the first time in my life I saw a movie, at a cinema, by myself. I always thought I’d feel like a total loser if I went into a cinema by myself. When other people tell me they’ve been to a cinema by themselves I think they’re cool, but I just never had the courage to do it. Now I’ve done it and my life has changed. It’s fantastic. You can sit where you want, fidget, nobody talks to you… I’m never seeing a film with a friend again. The movie I saw was ‘In Bruges’. Film Review: One big ‘meh’.

4. Caught up win an ex (from 9 years ago) who, for the last 9 years I’ve secretly wished I was still with (even though I ended it at the time, because I was a shallow idiot). We’re still very close friends. She announced her engagement. She has asked me to be ‘MC’ at her wedding. “I’m honoured,” I said, and my task between now and then is to work out how I can MC their wedding without bursting into tears.

5. In the evening, my band went into the studio to do a night of backing vocals for songs we’ve recorded in the past few months. Highlight: Writing in big texta words on a piece of paper, “Oh-law-dee-oh-day-oh-dee-oh” and then taking twenty takes to get it right. There were problems because nobody remembered to bring any cannabis. I don’t smoke pot so I didn’t care (potheads = boring meatheads) but the rest of the band struggled through the process.

6. Hamburger from Embassy Café on Spencer Street at 12.15am. There are no better hamburgers in the world than from this 24hr taxi-driver café. A better hamburger you say? BULL FUCKING SHIT!

7. Grocery shopping at Geelong at 1.15am. Who shops for groceries in working-class country towns at that time? The drugged, the drunk, the insane, the ill-adjusted and the desperately lonely. You want a snapshot of the rubble of Western Society? Shop for groceries in the middle of the night in a country town. Lock the car.

8. Came home at about 3am. Logged on to find Ramon has insulted my friend. I made a lame defense. Fed angry cat and went straight to bed.

9. Couldn't sleep.

Language Is Dead

I own my own business. I have one full-time employee, one permanent part-time employee (accounts, because I'm spastic at them), and a few casuals.

My business plan is all of two words: "Wing it." (That also doubles up as my company Vision Statement, and I'm thinking of using it as a slogan, you know, like, "Perseus Enterprises: Winging it since 1999"

But every now and then I think to myself, "Maybe I should expand, or at least try to. Maybe I should make a real business plan, or improve my 'systems' or whatever."

So anyways, I got this brochure in the mail asking me if my 'business processes flow smoothly', and if not, this company called Business Process Management (BPM) can sell me products that will help me to deliver 'efficient, reliable and competitive processes'. They have a seminar coming up too!

Being that I don't have an actual process, I decided to read the brochure.

They open with, "It's not just you - it really is getting harder to outplace the other guys".

Well, that doesn't help, because I know the 'other guys' and we all get along and I have no desire to 'outplace' them. In fact, we spend a fair bit of time passing work to one another.

They then tell me that BPM is, "one of the most valuable IT investments an organisation can make," and further, "...BPM provides the glue between your people and the disparate software applications that operate across your departments"

Like, umm, Microsoft Word?

They then serve me a quote from the Harvard Business Review... "In this competitive environment the mantra for any CEO should be 'Deploy, Innovate and Propagate'"

What, are they Daleks?

Next up is this ripper: "BPM helps achieve your business objectives by providing a consistent process layer across the organisation and embedding best practice".

By now I'm halfway through the brochure, and I still have no idea what this company actually does. Do they sell laptops?

They then promise to 'enable' a whole range of things for me, including a, "greater agility to react to business changes".

Now they move on to why I should come to their seminar (and by this stage, I was ready to sign up purely to find out who wrote this brochure so I could punch him in the fucking face).

The seminar promises to "...introduce (me) to the FLOWCENTRIC Business Process Managament suite."

Right, now they're starting to sound like Scientologists.

"Any time your business processes don't fit entirely within core enterprise applications, the answer may be BPM"

What the shite is a 'core enterprise application'?

BPM may very well be the answer, but I don't even fucking know what the question is!

They finish off by mentioning they've been in business for 18 years, and that seating is 'strictly limited' at the seminar.

Look BPM, I'd love to come to your seminar, but unfortunately my hair can't wash itself.

What really fucking kills me is that some cunt with a Communications or Marketing degree, or maybe even an MBA for good measure, wrote this impenetrable gobbledygook and no doubt got paid big bucks for it, and yet here I am, a potential customer, hating them because I was forced to read their rubbish and still have no fucking idea what they actually DO.

It is the death of language.

Vale, English.

Bloop, bloop, bloop - another one bites the dust.

Don Smallgoods was founded in 1940-something by the very successful butcher / abattoir owner, RJ Gilberston (some of our older readers may remember his chain of butcher outlets). Named after his beloved football team and suburb (Essendon), he changed the menus of ‘ordinary working families’ (c) K. Rudd.

Who hasn’t been to a party where Don kabana, stras, salami or frankfurts were served? Amongst Australian readers, I assume none. Before old RJ founded the smallgoods manufacturer, processed cured meat was, just like soccer, garlic and spaghetti, for ‘wogs’, but he put thinly sliced strasbourg on the everyman's plate (next to the Coon cheese squares and those sickeningly sweet green cocktail onions).

Cut forward 60 years later to today, where the current owners of the brand, George Weston Foods Limited, have announced that 620 people (many of which do not speak English) have lost their jobs. Of course, marketing and HR departments get to keep their jobs, but the manufacture of the smallgoods looks like it’ll head off-shore.

They have promised to offer the sacked workers, “transition program employment assistance” – I speak English fluently and I don’t have any idea what that means, so god help their migrant workforce.

“They were incredibly sad and disappointed that this is the decision that's been made and we took them through the reasons for the decision," he (Don Sutton CEO) said. Mr Sutton said Don Smallgoods had suffered about $80 million in losses over the past nine years ...

If that’s the magnitude of the financial loss then yeah, that’s what has to be done, and I feel genuine pity for the workers. But the reason why I’m posting on this dry corporate matter is because I know a bit about this joint.

Here’s my version of events. RJ Gilbertson founded a top quality company and it was highly profitable. His descendants largely hate each other’s guts and the company got bundled up in the 80’s and sold off in bits because greed was good back then and none of the family could get along properly. History is full of examples of families falling apart when money gets involved. You want your grandchildren to all get along like kissing cousins? Well, if you’re a millionaire businessman leaving your company to your children, I tell you, no fucking chance.

Some of them still live handsomely on the proceeds of the sale but the company itself has gone down the drain because large multi-national companies quite often have no idea how to run a boutique family business which should not have been sold in the first place. Much of a company’s equity exists in the ether and can only be understood by people who personally care about the product and helped build the company.

The Gilberston name is still revered in Essendon - at the club, and throughout the streets, but old RJ, who by all accounts was a top bloke, is turning in his grave tonight.

I’m not a knocker of modern society. I think the world, despite pollution, gets better year by year. But one thing modern society can’t seem to handle is ‘family businesses’. Another Aussie icon bites the dust.

Is Don, Is Broke.