A small dash of technology but a large helping of expertise

Last week we were invited to host and moderate a “Learning Lab” session at the SharedServicesLink.com conference on Electronic Invoicing held in London. We spent 3 hours with a number of companies who are on the brink of implementing e-procurement or e-invoicing solutions. We kept the session very practical drawing on the decades of experience our team have of deploying such solutions across our customer base.

A very interesting thing happened at the end of the session. A member of the audience took one of our team to one side and told him that he had evaluated our technology alongside several other companies a few months earlier. There was nothing to distinguish one company’s technology from the others. They all had much the same features. For reasons he was unable to remember EGS was not taken forward to the short list. But here is the really interesting part. He told our man that having listened to us for 3 hours that afternoon, he was so impressed with our knowledge and our practical advice, that he was not only going to put us back on the short list, he was going to put us to the top of it.

We thought this was interesting. We have always had complete confidence in our ability to deliver what we promise, when we promise. What was most significant about this and what this customer believed set us apart, is that our accrued expertise and domain knowledge enables us to help organisations make the big decisions. That doesn't come out of a box or from clever developers. It takes years to accrue.

So the lesson learned is that it is not always about the technology. Much of our value is the expertise that we bring with the technology.