Keri Condon had a problem. The local manager of Music & Retail Systems (MARS), a music retail software company, Condon was asked by his Australian boss to solve a small technical hitch. Please collect sales data from music shops, transmit it to head office and send the analysed data back again, via email, his boss asked. And then do the same with the data used to compile the weekly Australian music charts for the Australian Recording Industry Association.
Easy, right? After all, the company already did all these things using a sophisticated and expensive fixed network of ISDN and leased lines. Condon just had to make it more cost-effective. Surely there’d be 101 suppliers from California to the Hindu Kush with such an obvious service. Apparently not.
“I looked on the internet for months, but there was nothing,” Condon says. Then early this year, he discovered that an unknown company called Computer Works had launched MailRules, a system that seemed to do exactly what MARS wanted. Condon searched for a phone number. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “I had combed the world to find a solution and the company I found had a +64 9 prefix.”
In the end, MARS’s Australian parent liked MailRules so much, it ended up signing a major deal with Computer Works involving selling several hundred MailRules licences over the next 12 months.
Computer Works is the brainchild of Aucklander Mike Mohanbhai, a former Fisher & Paykel engineer with a talent for R&D. “I could see opportunities, not just from a technical point of view but from the customer’s.” Years later, after honing his skills with IBM, Paxis and Solution 6, Mohanbhai used this customer sympathy to develop MailRules. The logic for MailRules is so simple it’s astonishing no one’s developed the product anywhere else. At its most basic, the software collects sales data from a shop or office and sends it by email to head office, where it automatically triggers the head office computer to begin processing the data. Then it sends the analysed data back again. What’s revolutionary (but shouldn’t be) is that it doesn’t require any human action. You simply programme your system to transmit every hour or so.
MailRules has also got around the problem of ISPs setting limits on the amount of data you can send. The program fools the ISP by automatically splitting large files into bits, sending each bit separately and then putting the file together at the other end.
Despite only being launched officially in March, the program is already being used by Nike, Pitstop, Mainfreight and CRC Industries in New Zealand. An Australian water treatment plant manufacturer has it. So does a 15-store chain in Kentucky. It was also used to collate results for a recent Belgian local body election.
Roger van Dorsten, logistics project manager for Mainfreight, discovered MailRules almost by chance. He’d been looking for a system that could automatically strip attachments from orders sent by email and, like Condon, could find no off-the-shelf solution. Having someone design a system for Mainfreight was going to cost $5000, but suddenly he discovered a Kiwi company doing the same job for $US200. “I sent off my cheque, then I wrote to them and told them they were selling it much too cheap.”
So, can Computer Works make decent money? So far, all development has been funded internally, from profits from consultancy work. But now Mohanbhai is thinking bigger. He believes turnover could rise from just under $1 million now to $5–10 million in two or three years. To produce this sort of growth, the company has hired Richard Miller, former chief executive of Epson NZ and former Asia-Pacific vice-president of Motorola. Miller will help find an investor not only willing to put between $2 million and $6 million into the company, but also able to provide knowledge of international markets and sales channels overseas. Miller says he’d rather work with a local partner and is in discussions with a couple of companies. He hopes a deal will be done by October.
Mohanbhai, a passionate perfectionist who does yoga to make himself “more focused, more relaxed”, is calmly optimistic. “We are cautious. It’s about focusing on doing things really well. In a small business you can’t be all things to all people. If you focus on 10 things, not three, then 10 things don’t happen.”