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February 1990 to January 1994
Buffalo Products, Inc., Salem, Oregon, USA
Director of Technical Services
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Key Accomplishments
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- Designed, developed, and deployed Help-Desk Support System, integrated throughout corporation (accounting, sales, and operations).
- Helped define strategic direction for the company under extreme pressure to grow from the main office in Japan.
- Built a top-notch international support organization, responsible for customer loyalty, that impacted the bottom line (70% of repeat sales based upon loyalty).
- Represented Buffalo Products to press and stockholders in Japan and the United States. (I was the token American face on the company's stock prospectus brochure during IPO in Japan).
- Developed staff from front-line tech support to top-of-the-line technicians.
- Built technical marketing teams to help sales and marketing break into Fortune 500 companies.
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Summary of Skills Used
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PROJECT EXPERIENCE
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TECH EXPERIENCE
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Executive Staff Member
Strategic Contributor
Department Level Supervision
Budget Management ($500k)
Recruiting
Interviewing
Hiring
Firing
Internal Training
External Training
Departmental Policy
Customer Service Policy
RMA Policy and Management
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Visual BASIC Programming
Novell Servers 3.x
IPX Network Technologies
PBX Telephone Systems
FoxPro Database
In-depth Intel Architecture
BIOS Technologies
Quality Assurance
Troubleshooting Technique
User Manual Editorship
Technical Writing
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HIGHLIGHTS
About Buffalo Products, Inc.
Buffalo was a wholly owned subsidiary of a Japanese Company (Melco Inc.). Melco manufactured hardware products for Japanese markets and only had a few products that could be sold in the American markets due to protocol incompatibilities or even operating system support (most products based upon NEC V20 processors). Our company distributed whatever Melco products we could localize, market, and sell in the United States.
World Class Customer Support
My most important goal at Buffalo was to build a service department which could provide one call solutions provided by real human beings. During this era in computing the automated phone tree and lack of quality support was one of the biggest detractors for most hardware buyers. Excellence in customer support was one of our competitive advantages. Our support lines were answered within three rings by a fully-trained technicians - no 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level hand-offs. Our customers loved us. We built a community around our products. Repeat and word-of-mouth sales formed 70% of our sales out 1993.
I trained my technicians to be as excellent in customer service as they were in technical knowledge. I still keep in touch with them. Some are still in support working at Symantec and some have gone into QA or IT roles in other companies.
My department was very ordered, reliable, and full of gusto. We took on a number of additional duties that didn't fit into the other departments in the company. We were the QA service, the tech writers, the sales engineers, the technical marketers, and the product developers.
We wrote and edited all instructional manuals and literature for the product lines. We were also a tight feedback loop to the engineering group in their ROM code development. With our support they were able to adjust the data timing of the ROM code in our SL models to allow serial telecommunications through the devices.
The key to handling more calls with less manpower was to equip the technicians with as much automated support as was possible. Lacking the funding to hire programmers to develop in-house tools, I designed, developed, and implemented a networked technical support help desk system. Note: This was back when help-desk automation was a new idea. Features included: knowledge base, call problem tracking, call duration tracking, technical note fax delivery on demand from the keyboard, integration with the accounting system and sales order entry systems.
For this project I built the entire system in FoxPro for DOS. I integrated the system into a JetFax1000 system so that technicians could identify common problems for customers on the phone and press a button to instantly fax the appropriate technical document to the customer. This practice allowed us to close 80% of the service calls in less than 8 minutes.
The system kept logs of each technician’s call duration, call problem, and solution. This information was built into daily and weekly reports which I was able to use as indicators of the need for additional staff training. I was also able to use this information to point out serious problems with products to the engineering team so that we could improve our product quickly.
Technicians could pull up RMA status information for customers which was drawn on a daily basis from the accounting system. I even had a data entry workstation in the RMA Lab so that the repair technicians could enter the status of their work directly into my database.
I am very proud of how well my group fit together and filled a mission-critical role with expertise and professionalism.
The Buffalo Box
 Our primary product was an external print buffer device that allowed printer sharing and print job spooling without an office environment requiring network hardware. Note: This was before the advent of affordable small networks. At the time, using ethernet for printing would have required purchasing complicated jumper set network cards, dealing with IRQ conflicts, and installing a multi-thousand dollar Novell server. So we sold many of these boxes.
Our product was very versatile, used serial and parallel interface technologies and could be used for more than buffering print jobs. We had many customers using our serial boxes to perform serial data dumps from one machine to several using standard modem file transfer software. I've seen everything from orbital satellite data streams to traffic signals get hooked up to these boxes.
To make our product even easier to use, we wrote a step by step install guide and embarked on a compatibility research frenzy that netted step by step instructions on dozens of modem transfer software, operating systems, and hardware devices including plotters, CAD/CAM machines, and more. Whatever could use standard RS232 or Parallel interfacing could talk to our devices. My technicians became experts at interfacing technologies and cabling pin-outs.
The Complete Network
Melco went public in late 1992 and had grown its Sales by about 300% in less than twelve months. Its American distribution company (us) was becoming an embarrassment on the ledgers in Japan because our growth was much slower. We were given the order to grow or be killed. We searched far and wide for products which we could pick up and sell through our existing reseller and direct mail channels. I personally performed technical due diligence testing on dozens of products. My favorite pick, although I was concerned about the potential support costs of maintaining our high level of personal service, was The Complete Network.
We created a boxed product containing two Intel EtherExpress 16 Network Adapter cards (we were one of Intel's first orders for the EE16's), a pre-measured length of cable, a simple splicing tool, a two user license of Web Network (a product we were OEM'ing from WebCorp in Sausalito, CA) and instructions. A lot of our loyal customers took a chance on the product with us betting on our high quality support and product reliability.
Right at the time of our product launch, Microsoft announced Windows for Workgroups and their strategic deal with Intel Corporation to bundle the easy to install EE16 network cards with it. We became a risky purchase compared to the mighty resources of Microsoft in the minds of the public.
Web Network was an IPX-based Novell-compatible peer to peer network that was very easy to install and configure. Only two months after we launched the product, Webcorp’s president and chief engineer was "acquired" by Microsoft to work on their networking products (he had valuable Novell reverse-engineering knowledge) ending Webcorp and our product.
The Complete Network was a good product with low COGS. It was easy to support and competitively priced but our sales channels were mostly based on our existing customer-base and cheap ads in the back of PC Magazine. The product failed and was retired a few months after we launched it.
The good news is that my team became experts at ethernet networking, cabling, and IPX based communications. All these skills served them well in future jobs... and it was good for me too.
The PowerKit CPU Upgrade
 Our next foray into new products was by bundling CPU upgrade technology based upon Cyrix and Texas Instruments processors developed by a small engineering house in Corvallis, Oregon (Evergreen Technologies) with our own software and packaging.
The decision to produce this was very hotly debated within our staff but the company was desperate to show signs of growth and running out of time. I was ordered to comply and did so. The PowerKit product caused the company tremendous losses due to the low price of the product and the high cost of the support services and refunds. We received over 40% of the shipped product back for refunds, mostly because it was widely incompatible with many older PCs. The mother company decided to merge us with another of its flailing American subsidiaries and cut headcount. When I left the company we had 35 employees. The company eventually fell back to around ten employees and rebuilt itself upon importing memory products from the mother company in Japan (Melco Inc.).
Additional Information
I promoted professionalism in my employees. We were a supporting member of the Software Support Professionals Association in its charter years.
After I left, one of my exec staff peers felt compelled to give me a Letter of Commendation.
 
Moving Forward
Buffalo Products was a hardcore sweatshop of a place where company survival was the order of the day. We had a sweet period in the early years of my tenure because our Buffalo Box margins were quite high. But as Buffalo sales began to decline -- with the spread of inexpensive ethernet -- it took the entire company out of the comfort zone and challenged us to succeed or die trying on very small margins. Every one of the people who survived there were warriors of a caste I've yet to see again.
Every one of my staff had to be producers and heroes every day. There were many hirings, trainings, and firings. In a sick sort of way I miss those days of gut-wrenching challenge.
 previous experience
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