My name is Kim Orumchian. Right90 is the 6th startup I have worked at and the second one I have started. The previous company I co-founded was called Fatbrain. Fatbrain was a b2b version of Amazon.com, selling books and training materials to corporations. Fatbrain grew from my house in Palo Alto, to become a $100M company with over 400 employees. We took Fatbrain public in 1998 and sold it to BarnesandNoble.com almost exactly two years later. By that point we were the third largest online book retailer behind Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.
At Fatbrain, I ran Engineering and Operations and was responsible for buying and implementing SAP R/3 to be the system of record. Although Fatbrain was technically an ecommerce retailer, we thought of ourselves more of a manufacturer – assembling orders of books from a supply chain of more than 50,000 book publishers.
There were 3 observations based on my experience at Fatbrain that led me to start Right90.
- Companies that have a complex product mix can get huge business value from predicting the mix correctly well in advance: better margins, higher customer satisfaction, predictable earnings, and lower inventory obsolescence.
- Sales people and product managers that are on the front lines and closest to customers usually have good instincts about what is going to sell and should be listened to yet management and other parts of the company usually ignore their perspectives. There should be an easy way to capture what they think and present it to management without taking a lot of time or effort.
- SAP and systems like it are not good at capturing and scrubbing sales forecasts but could benefit a lot from having better demand forecasts to drive operational planning, executive reporting and budgeting.
We created Right90 as a SaaS (software as service) company because we saw that sales forecasting would need to reach across company boundaries to involve supply chain partners, customers, channel partners, and distributors and that an on-premise solution would not be able to do this easily or effectively.
We chose the name Right90 to mean “have the Right 90 days” as in “have the Right quarter.”
Tags: history, introduction, Sales, sales analytics