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By Chuck Frey
 One of the biggest challenges that many companies face when implementing an idea management system is it forces them to change their business processes to a significant degree in order to accommodate its limitations. That’s not the case with SimNet 8, the highly customizable idea management toolset offered by TQS Sim.
I recently had an opportunity to get a demo of the features of SimNet 8 with TQS Sim president Jim Schwarz. I expected to see another me-too idea management application that does a fairly structured job of enabling employees to enter their ideas into the system, enabling others to comment on them and enabling a small group of managers to evaluate What I saw was something more – a flexible technology platform that can be adapted to the innovation business processes of many different types of companies.
In fact, one of Schwarz’s biggest challenges these days isn’t his firm’s technology platform, it’s changing the market’s perception of SimNet as simply an electronic “suggestion box” – clearly, it has evolved into much more than that, as you will see in this review.
SimNet 8’s ambitious design goals
When Schwarz and his team developed design goals for SimNet 8, they set some fairly ambitious objectives: enable companies to manage their ideas in the ways that they are most comfortable with, and which fit well with their culture and business processes. Accommodate growth and changing needs in corporations. Build it around .NET and SQL, so it could handle single sign-on to corporate intranets and portal sites, and enable other properly-authenticated applications to query its database. And add automation tools to it, so employees can be automatically notified whenever anything happens to the ideas they have submitted. The bottom line was that TQS Sim wanted to enable companies to manage their ideas with a great deal of flexibility.
Based on what I saw in my demonstration of SimNet 8, the team at TQS Sim accomplished that – and then some.
Submitting ideas to SimNet 8
SimNet 8 provides a multi-page, customizable “wizard” where employees can submit their ideas. You first submit the basics of your idea. Next, several additional screens prompt you for additional details, such as assigning it to a specific, currently-open idea campaign, indicating whether or not your immediate supervisor needs to review the idea prior to implementation, assigning it to a category and submitting it or saving it as a draft. These additional screens may be customized by the client to capture any information they need to accompany the idea. They can even be customized by company division or facility.
If you indicated that your supervisor needs to review an idea prior to implementation, the system automatically prompts you to select his or her name from a list. He or she then receives an e-mail notification that one or more ideas are awaiting review. Nice!
Based upon the demo that Schwarz showed me, you can map the idea submission questions to the client’s process for capturing ideas. You can even use it for patent disclosure, adding questions specific to the key technology or area the patent is related to, whether or not a disclosure form has been signed, the novelty of the idea, project codes and more.
In fact, SimNet 8 can accommodate multiple idea workflows, each one mapped to a specific department’s or division’s needs. Who you are and what groups you are a part of determines which of them you are authorized to view and participate in.
Viewing and managing ideas
SimNet 8 also enables administrators to provide employees with detailed reports about the status of the ideas they have submitted. This is important, because it helps companies to maintain employee engagement in its idea management system. Employees can clearly see which of their ideas have been adopted, and which are still in process.
On the back end of SimNet 8, administrators can set up customized reports, enabling them to track metrics such as the average number of days to process ideas and implement them. One SimNet client takes this data and ties it to annual employee reviews. This enables supervisors to keep its employees focused upon submitting ideas that are focused upon the company’s strategic objectives.
Evaluating ideas
Supervisors who are charged with evaluating ideas have access to a very robust toolset in SimNet 8 that enables them to efficiently do their job. A task view shows them the “jobs” they’re doing for each idea – in other words, their role vis-à-vis the idea. They may only have oversight on an idea, or may be an implementer of it. If an idea needs more detail before they can make a decision, it’s easy to create and delegate a task for it.
One of the unique aspects of the idea evaluation module of SimNet 8 is that clients can create their own customized idea evaluation forms. Schwarz explains that clients can easily design these forms in Microsoft Excel, which TQS Sim then embeds into the idea evaluation workflow. Typically, the idea management software vendor must do this type of customization for the client; it’s nice to see that TQS Sim is comfortable returning this level of control to its corporate clients.
In addition, SimNet 8 enables clients to set up different forms for each “gate” or step in their innovation process. You can even create two different forms, so that a small, incremental idea gets evaluated differently than a large, complex one. Nice!
Reviewers can add comments to ideas, helping to generate additional visibility for ideas of merit that may have been overlooked before. SimNet 8 offers a “tag cloud” view of ideas that are currently in the evaluation process, which makes it easy for administrators to see who is sitting on ideas and where the bottlenecks are in the company’s innovation processes.
Awards and recognition
SimNet 8 has been designed to enable clients to set up nearly any kind of idea award or recognition program, including programs that are cash-based, points and invitations to luncheons for employees who have done a good job of supporting the company’s idea campaigns. This full-featured application even includes an online store, where employees can redeem the points they’ve earned.
SimNet 8 gives administrators a great deal of freedom in designing schemes for assigning points and recognition. For example, you can assign points when an idea is first submitted, based upon the type of idea (improvement vs. new product ideas) and when an idea is implemented. Points for ideas can be controlled any way the client wants.
Full-featured reporting and administration toolset
SimNet 8 was designed with a powerful reporting engine, which clients and TQS Sim can use to customize reports to the client’s specific needs. For example, many companies don’t suffer from a shortage of ideas – quite the opposite. They have so many ideas that their processes for evaluating and implementing them tend to get bogged down. SimNet 8 gives you the power to quickly see where ideas are getting “stuck,” so you can take corrective action with the managers who are delaying them.
Administrators can also set up events or triggers, using SimNet’s built in automation tools. When an event occurs, an action happens. An e-mail notification is sent to someone. A personalized idea award letter is automatically printed out. Points are assigned to an idea. A subject matter expert is notified. This is a powerful tool that should help to improve idea throughput and should keep idea submitters and evaluators fully engaged in utilizing it.
TQS Sim designed a fairly simple administrative interface that enables clients to handle many basic tasks – such as setting up users, campaigns, tags and user groups themselves. For those who want to be “power users,” however, the developer can train client administrators to do much more. SimNet 8 uses role-based security, giving clients a high degree of freedom in controlling who gets to see what.
In addition, SimNet 8 is designed to support multiple languages. This extends beyond localizing field labels (what a piece of information is called – such as name, department, phone number, etc.) to also translate any specialized terminology the client uses and localized currency. SimNet 8 even handles Arabic characters, flipping the screen left to right to mimic the way people from this culture read.
Conclusion
The demonstration I saw of SimNet 8 was quite impressive. This system has a lot of power and flexibility build into it, to ensure that clients can easily customize to meet the need of their existing innovation processes. The fact is, the innovation processes in many companies aren’t linear – that’s why the idea management toolset used to manage them must accommodate a high degree of customization, right out of the box – rather than having to be highly customized at significant cost by the software developer.
Although SimNet may have its roots in electronic suggestion systems, it’s obvious that with this new iteration, TQS Sim has moved well beyond that foundation to offer companies a flexible, powerful, highly customizable idea management engine.
Related Web site: http://www.tqs-sim.com/SimNet8.aspx
2/4/2010
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