Sophistication and refinement as Quality Direct moves up to 5.5

By Stephen Ballantyne

Friday 12th May 2000

April was a busy month for IT service and hardware provider Axon: unlike most service providers it actually has a product of its own to maintain and develop - its Quality Direct e-commerce system has now reached version 5.5, reflecting its high level of sophistication and refinement.

For Axon's customers, it is indeed more than a website. "We shifted to a Microsoft platform last year, and we've continued to improve the processes and functions, and worked on the look and feel to make it more resemble an application than just somebody's website," says Matt Kenealy, Axon's managing director.

"A lot of questions that CEOs and CIOs have are along the lines of, 'we know we need to do this e-commerce stuff but what should we tackle first? And will someone please stand up and tell us it actually makes a difference?'

"It's understandable - dotcoms don't make any money, at least in the short term; people stick an electronic brochure up as a website and find it doesn't make any money; and we have people who sell stuff on the web but they won't say how much or if it's actually good business.

"Our position is the internet won't start to make money for businesses until they start to transact, which is more than selling but also includes exchanging information with customers and suppliers; and they won't really make money until the process is integrated with the rest of business systems.

"Quality Direct is not just a site but also a demonstration of some of these systems, and proof that you can really make money out of e-commerce."

From the start, Quality Direct has been more than a static website. Most of it is accessible only to Axon's customers, who are able to use passwords to access the details of their accounts and, thanks to arrangements Axon has made with its suppliers, determine the true status of orders that may be in progress through the system.

While typical websites, even sophis- ticated database-driven ones, are usually works in progress with endless behind-the-scenes tweaking being performed by webmasters, Axon has been more careful to track the versioning of Quality Direct - treating it as a product is a strategy that helps to maintain its functionality, particularly with the extension of the system into new fields.

In particular, Axon is releasing some of the modules it has developed for Quality Direct to its customers so they can construct their own on-line front ends while remaining conformant to the data standards Axon has set for Quality Direct.

In use, Quality Direct resembles Microsoft's Outlook, possibly Microsoft's most significant contribution to user interface design - an interface that has been widely reproduced by conventional applications developers and webmasters.

With major categories ranged along the top of its window, sub-categories running down the left side, users with any experience of current Windows applications should have no difficulty in navigating Quality Direct.

Over the past two years Axon has managed to reduce its cost of making a sale by 40%, thanks to Quality Direct, leading to redeployment of staff to handle the growth it has experienced.

Customers are successfully placing their own orders, order tracking is hitting high levels of accuracy and customer satisfaction has improved substantially.

Naturally, Mr Kenealy is pleased: "There is a broad message about electronic commerce here - we're an example that proves it works, and we're also proving we're a company that can do it."

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