Inovis

Jonathan D. Gatrell
Senior Director, Portfolio Strategy
jonathan.gatrell@inovis.com
www.inovis.com

What does Inovis do?

Inovis is a B2B software and service provider which delivers Business Community Management solutions for global supply chains. Inovis helps companies automate their critical business processes and deliver increased speed to revenue and provides ongoing visibility into the transaction lifecycle for both their customers and supplier communities. Inovis has an over 20 year legacy of proven expertise in successfully enabling, managing and optimizing business communities and delivering innovation which continues to propel growth of the business.

How do your products/services help your customers?

The Inovis solutions deliver flexible deployment and solution models which allow rapid implementations and speed to benefit and addresses their business requirements today, with extensibility and a growth path for future needs. The typical customer will automate the order-to-cash, order-to-fulfillment or other critical business processes such as transportation or product introduction. Inovis has several key solution areas which deliver secure transaction exchange, event management and global data synchronization capabilities to improve data quality, timeliness and ensure ongoing insight into their critical business partner activities.

What is something unique about Inovis that you wish everyone knew?

Inovis continues to invest in our customers and our product innovation plans. A key tenet in our go-to-market model is understand, service and improve on our customers/prospects business needs. Inovis is consistently working with our customers through ongoing outreach and primary customer and market research which drives our strategy and continues to evolve our business model. Inovis’ maintains a set of core values where are part of our company’s DNA from which all of our corporate initiatives embody - Integrity, Quality, Accountability, Communication and People. These core values are central to every customer interaction.

When was your most recent launch and how did it go?

Inovis has comprehensive solution portfolio for Business Community Management (BCM) which ranges from on-demand applications to enterprise class B2B software solutions, with the complexity of BCM, Inovis is consistently bringing new solutions and innovation to the market. Recently Inovis launched a corporate re-branding initiative - which was a great success. Using customer input, market trends and a dedicated team of domain experts, we engaged in a 360 launch initiative which delivered key market messaging and solution packaging which helps differentiate our Business Community Management solutions in the marketplace.

What did you learn from the launch?

The key lesson learned from the re-branding initiative was transparency. Engage multiple levels inside the organization and cross-functionally to ensure everyone has input within the business. Once the Inovis team had set the first set of strategies, goals and initial launch tactics in place - we engaged our customers, prospects and business partners for a sanity check.

This critical market outreach step identified key value items WE didn’t think about ourselves and in fact didn’t even recognize as a strength in the market. With a holistic view of the market, our go to market positioning gained increased relevance as we engaged the analyst community for the final strategy temperature check which went great since we had the a market focused product strategy, customer validation and a firm understanding of how the market views the value we provide.

What would you do differently on the next launch?

Take a more iterative approach which engages key market constituencies quicker in the process, since there is immense value in the voice of the customer/market. With an iterative approach to launching a product you get early input and information which helps prioritize and deliver a successful launch. The other benefit of an iterative approach is you avoid the typical pitfalls of an exclusively internal approach to launching a product or brand into the market which misses key market views and insight you can’t get inside the four walls.