BSA Champions Software Solution

When Britt Fogg gets behind his computer, his speech quickens. He talks in acronyms and clicks the mouse as fast as an old-fashioned telegraph. He levitates out of his chair, leaning forward as if he could dive into the screen.

Fogg is excited about his point-of-sale software application, Shiloh 3.1.

A pilot and aerospace scientist turned programmer, Fogg is the chief technology officer of Bentonville Software Associates LLC in the hometown of the world’s largest retailer.

Shiloh is the firm’s whip-cracking analysis application for companies that supply retailers. It generates on-the-fly, custom reports that help suppliers keep track of inventory replenishment, item rollouts, distribution, promotions and sales forecasting. It takes information from a retailer’s network, Retail Link in Wal-Mart’s case, and converts it into an easily analyzed form.

On top of the killer app poised to change the software scene in “Vendorville,” the company has brought on board former Sam’s Club executive Lisa Bohn as its CEO.

Bohn worked with the Sam’s division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for five years, and her presence is a sign the five BSA investors, headed by Bentonville banker Dan Dykema, understand their market and are serious about pursuing it.

The company has 10 customers but has interest from several Fortune 500 companies, Bohn said. They weren’t able to divulge who any of their customers are though, citing confidentiality agreements.

BSA is taking baby steps and is cautious about how many clients it takes on, she said. The plan is to make sure the company can service current client needs before growth, she said.

Bohn declined to talk about hard sales goal numbers or revenue projections for BSA.

“It’s not a numbers game for us,” she said. “We’re working the group [of clients] we have.”

She said that of the thousands of suppliers to Wal-Mart, BSA would like to eventually sign on 200 to 300. That “would make our numbers work,” she said. Shiloh is a successful product, Bohn said, but the group isn’t sure just how successful yet.

A Shiloh package sells from between $25,000 (plus a 15 percent annual maintenance agreement for a one-user license), and $50,000 for a server-based team of users. That’s significantly cheaper than the competition, Bohn said. For suppliers who want to use Shiloh for more than one retailer, such as Wal-Mart and Kmart and Target, BSA has to custom quote.

The company has 10 employees and is looking to hire at least one more in the near future.

Shiloh Advantage

Four developers work on computers and sit back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a small room with a conference table in the middle. They work as a team on various functions of Shiloh and service accounts as needed. So far, BSA hasn’t invested in prime real estate, calling its cramped space overlooking the downtown Bentonville square home.

BSA, which was previously Fogg’s FBS Inc. of Springdale, picked up a group of investors this past spring. The company moved to Bentonville in September and piggy-backed on Fogg’s software.

Fogg, a Springdale native, worked for Tyson Foods Inc. and then went independent in 1994 with FBS, a contract and consulting tech firm. He has designed systems for Tyson, ConAgra Foods Inc. and other area companies.

Under development by Fogg since 1999, Shiloh basically downloads, manages, analyzes and supports data for retail suppliers. It houses data on the item, store and daily or weekly turnover rate. From those three pieces of information, virtually anything an analyst might want to know about product performance can be extrapolated.

Bohn compared Shiloh to a data warehouse. Essentially, it keeps the data in its roughest, unanalyzed, lowest common denominator form (item, store and time rate). Then when a supplier needs to build a report, it puts the bits of data together in a form the user specifies as they go.

Suppliers have mounds and mounds of data, Bohn said, and they ask themselves what is valuable and what to take action on.

“Their needs change constantly, the business changes … Shiloh is meant to allow you understand all your information,” Bohn said.

For example, if a supplier has all of its most up-to-date data downloaded from Wal-Mart’s Retail Link, or any retailer’s point-of-sale information pipeline, that supplier could ask Shiloh to run a report on how many of item X was sold in a particular region on Fridays for the months of June and October. A report would be generated and converted into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet along with detailed information about the parameters used to generate it (item, region, days, special calculations used, etc.).

Bohn and Fogg said the reports are “actionable” data. In other words, Shiloh puts information in decision-makers’ hands so appropriate business action can be taken by the supplier.

The pair said the concept behind Shiloh isn’t completely new. Other companies have products that offer similar functions but with limited range. BSA’s success will lie in their ability to make Shiloh function for all of its customers, all the time, easily and at a comparatively low price.

Fogg performed a demonstration with the scenario of a supplier trying to locate why two items have soft sales. Through a series of process and elimination calculations he and Bohn call “drilling,” he was able to discover four stores in a region had no inventory.

“Every time you find something, it’s almost like: ‘well, now I’ve got another question,'” Fogg said.

Armed with the final information, a category manager could investigate why inventory levels were low at those specific stores for the time period specified, say two or six months. It could be a distribution or a manufacturing problem or a host of other issues.

“Now I can drill up and down and get to that answer with nothing stopping me but my own imagination,” Bohn said.

Simply Speedy

The duo gave an example of Hurricane Ivan heading for the East Coast and a supplier wanting to know what inventory it had in affected stores. Fogg set the parameters and filters with only the mouse and limited keystrokes. Within seconds a detailed report was generated that contained a group of items at a group of stores in a specific time frame.

If the storm altered course to hit the Gulf of Mexico rather than the East Coast later in the day, a revised report could be generated just as easily, Bohn said.

With current technologies and applications, a supplier usually has to wait for an information technology specialist to write or reconfigure a program to run the same examples above. That IT person may be employed by the software developer, who might be as far away as California, and time is a tremendous factor suppliers can’t spare.

Shiloh, with local BSA support, theoretically will allow suppliers to stay light on their feet, both in personnel and reaction speed.

“[Fogg] developed with the suppliers for the suppliers,” she said. “And so, it was really their specs, their needs, their requirements that helped define the beginning of Shiloh.”

“If you can use [Microsoft] Office, you can use Shiloh,” she said.

Another competitive advantage, Bohn said, is the company’s location. The entire team is in Northwest Arkansas, so support is easy. If a supplier decides it needs the software to do something it currently doesn’t, Fogg and the rest of the team is available and willing to work out a solution. The program is a constantly evolving product, she said.

“We’re here to help the suppliers move their business forward,” Bohn said.

Fogg said Shiloh keeps only one copy of the data instead of redundant copies in various forms. Therefore, the program doesn’t require extra, expensive hardware.

Bohn said a single representative who is in the area to serve a vendor’s Wal-Mart account could run the application from their desktop without the need for any server. Multiple users require a typical office server, she said, without the need for the gigabyte guzzling computers other software requires.

Fogg said many of BSA’s clients setting up shop in the area are asking just as much about what they should do as they are about how to do it.

“What our vision is, is to help teach folks how to do better merchandise analysis. We’re not here just to teach them how to use Shiloh. Shiloh is simply the way to get there,” Bohn said.

That’s why the firm has hired people who have retail experience in various capacities.

“We want to make sure that we understand apparel, which is different from perishables, which is different from hard goods,” Bohn said.

For that reason, BSA is uniquely qualified to consult the Wal-Mart vendor community, the pair agreed.