David M. Carlson, Ph.D.

 Previous Clients

Read how Dave has helped some of his past customers with their unique situations.

Client #1: A large software company

Problem: A large software company ($100+ million in sales) had acquired a somewhat smaller software company ($10+ million in sales.) Both had relatively new systems for tracking the licenses for their software products. The sales and finance groups within each company felt that its organization's approach was superior to that of the other. Naturally the acquiring organization's people felt that they had the upper hand but, to the credit of the smaller organization, they firmly held to their position that they had the better solution. The CEO knew that he needed an experienced technology specialist and one who could get the cooperation of both groups to get beyond the unproductive conflict so he could better understand the architecture, functionality and long term viability of each of the two systems.

Solution: Dave was engaged for a four-day assignment. The first two days he interviewed all involved parties in two different locations and listened to all sides of the story. On the third day he received extensive demonstrations of each system. On the last day of the assignment he wrote up and sent off his conclusions.

Result: Within a week of signing the engagement letter, the CEO had a full understanding of the essential differences between the two systems. Within a few days he was able to make a highly informed decision to abandon the system developed by his own company and implement the superior system that had been developed by the acquired company.

Client #2: A Venture Capital firm

Problem: A Connecticut Venture Capital (VC) firm was about to make a several million dollar Series C investment in a software company that claimed to have a technology to connect the reservation system of a large car rental company with its franchisees. The software company also claimed to have an agreement with the car rental company to install this system within 90 days at which time they would receive a substantial license fee. Although the VC firm had confirmed the validity of the agreement they did not have resources to independently assess the technical architecture of the software solution (“Would it work?”) and the viability of the installation schedule (“When would it be installed?”)

Solution: Dave was engaged for a two and a half day assignment. The first morning he met with the VC firm and then with the management of the software firm to understand and document the scope of his study. In the afternoon of the first day and all of the second day, he met with the technical management and software engineers. He then spent another half day writing up his conclusions.

Result: Dave determined that the technical staff had not even started the detailed design of the application architecture and therefore there was no way that the application could be built and installed within 90 days. Using the information that Dave provided, the VC firm convinced the software company management and its investors that they needed more capital than anticipated to cover the additional development time and costs. Ultimately the VC firm provided the capital and secured a substantially higher percentage of the business and totally avoided the problems of missed target dates and the inevitable round of crisis funding.

Client #3: A large retailer with very severe out of stock conditions

Problem: A large retailer of house wares with several hundred stores was plagued with very severe out of stock conditions. (Before calling on the client the first time Dave visited some stores in the Detroit area and found that nearly 40% of the Oxo products, a high margin collection of kitchen items, were out of stock three weeks before Christmas. Upon questioning, store people advised him to go elsewhere because, “We won't get any more product in until after the first of the year.”)

Solution: In conjunction with a large consulting firm that specialized in SAP implementations, Dave worked with the retailer's CIO and the SAP implementation firm to put together a plan to acquire and install SAP. The plan was approved by the chain's merchants, COO and the executive committee in January.

Result: Unfortunately (and perhaps predictably,) a bad Christmas season forced the chain to close many of its stores and abandon its plans to replace its merchandising system with SAP. The CIO, one of the best in all of retailing, left within a few months and the company never regained the level of sales or profitability that it had achieved earlier in its history.

Comment: Certainly SAP is not for every company. In fact Nietzsche's famous maxim comes to mind: If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. Dave's extensive experience with enterprise systems and especially with merchandising systems, allows him to be a totally objective resource to help with SAP and other ERP decisions.

Client #4: A large supermarket with suspected scanning problems

Problem: The owner/operator of a large supermarket that had upgraded its scanning equipment a year earlier personally handled the checkout of a visiting Japanese businessman. The purchase was several hundred dollars and included several very expensive gourmet items. The next day the owner/operator discovered that the some of the most expensive items of the sale did not show up on the item movement report. After consulting the register tapes from the previous day he further determined that these items did not even get recorded as part of the original sale. Because the order for the businessman was so large even without these items, they were not missed at the time the order was finalized. This specific situation confirmed the owner's long held suspicion that the scanning system was somehow not recording some of the items that passed through the checkout. The company that installed the scanning system had not only been totally unresponsive to the owner/operator's requests for analysis and resolution but had told him that “it simply could never ever happen.”

Solution: Dave was engaged for a two-day assignment. A sample order of 50 items that covered all of the store's departments was created and Dave carefully scanned it three times to insure that the total of the order was accurate. Then the entire order was scanned 10 times by each of five cashiers at their normal speed. Dave watched to make sure every item was registered by the scanner and its “beep” was heard. Forty-seven of the orders exactly matched the expected total. However, three orders did not. The register tapes from the three non-matching orders were then carefully reviewed to better understand the differences. Dave found two conditions under which the scanner registered the item (“beeped”) but the point of sale system did not record it. Dave was able to confirm the patterns and within a few minutes was able to replicate the system's failure at will. Dave came back for another two days during which a licensed security firm and a video crew recorded examples of the failures for potential evidence in a lawsuit for damages. The videotaping was completed and the security firm authenticated the tapes as accurate reflections of the performance of the system. Dave's report was later used as expert testimony. In preparation for the trial Dave also advised on how to estimate financial damages using queuing theory and the fact that the intervals between items arriving at the scanner generally follow a Poisson distribution.

Result: A lawsuit by the owner/operator was launched in early 2005 with listed as an expert witness. The failure of the system is incontrovertible and the only real question is the level of damages that may be awarded to the Supermarket. After the plaintiff was informed of Dave's involvement as an expert witness the plaintiff settled.