Our sister publication, Wireless World, interviews CEO Ron Moss of Worthware Systems International, regarding the CellSell.
WW: What’s your main line of business?
RM: Worthware is a Canadian software development company that designs, markets and implements integrated accounting and retail ERP systems for cellular phone retailers under the CellSell® accounting systems brand. We launched the CellSell brand in 1991 to eliminate the need for cellular phone retailers to rely upon general purpose accounting software to run their businesses.
Our company is unique because we provide an affordable easy to implement and use, integrated accounting and true retail ERP platform, designed specifically for cellular phone retailers. CellSell accounting systems provide end-to-end business integration. This enables our customers to eliminate standalone, point-of-sale cellular software, retail management software and mass market general purpose accounting software, and the double-entry and issues of data inconsistency and lack of audit trial associated with their ongoing use and maintenance. CellSell accounting systems bind together all aspects of retail front office and back office operations, to create an unalterable audit trail in the general ledger and as a result, our customers can obtain timely and accurate financial reporting.
WW: What was your marketing program last year?
RM: Our program was to raise CellSell brand awareness and to encourage cellular phone retailers to recognize the importance of integrated accounting and true retail ERP to their business. We brought our value proposition to business owners and their financial people, and it was very well received. In fact the program is ongoing and we have never, been busier with new systems implementations.
WW: What were the most significant events affecting your company in the past year or this year?
RM: We received our certification from Global Payments for our electronic partner payment processing integration. This was a significant event for us, particularly in light of the strict PCI compliance requirements in Canada alone. We received our TELUS Sales Channel Notification Service Certification, so were now even more tightly integrated with internal TELUS POS activation work flows, than ever before. We’re very proud to be certified by Global Payments and TELUS, and these events are certainly milestones, but I would have to say that the single most significant event affecting our company last year was our full production roll-out of our own CellSell thin client connection software. This technology took us almost two years to perfect, we are extremely proud of it because it eliminates the need for installation or maintenance of sever side printer drivers, or use of any third-party universal printer drivers, or third-party thin client server connection software licensing. Everything we need to connect to a CellSell server and print to any local printer is built into each edition of CellSell. Our customers use this technology to connect electronic cash drawers, slip printers, biometric readers and signature capture devices and they get to keep their older PC’s in service in the role of dumb terminals, extending their life span and reducing IT costs. The CellSell thin client has been one of the most well received pieces of technology we’ve ever developed. It really simplifies our implementations. It’s exciting technology built for low bandwidth connections, so our customers can actually do full point-of-sale transactions including activations from anywhere.
WW: Did your marketing strategy in the past year provide you the overall position you had projected?
RM: Honestly, you set out with your game plan and you do your level best to execute, but you never really have any guarantee where you’ll end up. We feel very fortunate to have executed well and are extremely pleased with the results. Aside from raising CellSell brand awareness as I mentioned before, our marketing strategy was to demystify integrated accounting and cellular retail ERP. We wanted to get our breed of systems up on the radar screens of owners, and let them know, that we’ve made integrated accounting and cellular retail ERP simple, and affordable to implement, and we accomplished that. Where one year ago cellular retail owners we spoke with seemed unaware or ill informed about the benefits of integrated accounting or general concept of even traditional ERP, today we are now seeing in our business, those same cellular phone retailers recognizing that there is a better way to run their businesses, and they are coming to us, their coming to our platform. So yes, we are happy with our position, and we are looking forward to another great year for CellSell.
WW: Describe your current marketing strategy.
RM: Well first of all, we’re not marketing a commodity. We haven’t forgotten that we are still in the solutions business. We stay focused on our one vertical market and we concentrate on keeping our platform in step with needs of that market alone. While it’s true that we have our *out of the box* offerings, one of our greatest strengths of our company is our willingness and ability to custom fit some editions of CellSell to our customer’s precise specifications. We’ve designed CellSell to be a very flexible platform. This is a big part of our marketing strategy and key contributing factor to our market longevity and our success.
WW: Are you introducing any new products?
RM: Yes,we’ve actually introduced the next generation 2009 editions of CellSell as well as CellSell Reportlets, our user-customizable business intelligence reporting product at CTIA. CellSell Reportlets allows authorized users to quickly design and deploy customized business intelligence dashboards custom-built for individual users, throughout the enterprise without the need for any custom coding. We’ve built CellSell BI Reportlets a new XML-based design file reporting engine so the technology is designed to be future proof.
WW: What distinguishes your products from the competition?
RM: It’s important to understand that CellSell is the wireless retailer equivalent of the 'traditional ERP system.' People may not know or may forget, but most traditional ERP systems were originally developed many years ago, as either general purpose financial management systems, or as integrated modules for manufacturers not retailers, and definitely not cellular phone retailers. CellSell accounting systems on the other hand, were originally contemplated and developed as fully integrated financial accounting and POS systems, with an ERP operational framework and workflows, specifically designed for retailers of cellular phones. Today after 18 years of ongoing development, real-world testing and constant evolution, our now very mature CellSell, has emerged as an enterprise-wide information technology platform designed to integrate, consolidate and coordinate all the resources, information and activities needed to complete back office and front office cellular retailer business processes, such as, financial accounting, POS, carrier activations, customer relationship management, sales force automation, commission management, supply chain management, human resources, and business intelligence reporting. CellSell delivers every one of these elements, to our customers without the need for separate or standalone systems. That’s what we mean at Worthware, when we say, 'CellSell is true Cellular Retail ERP' or 'rue Retail ERP for wireless.' This is truly unprecedented.
WW: How do you compare the position of your products and their technology against the current market.
RM: The current market is made up of made up of standalone, POS cellular software or standalone cellular retail management systems that may or may not, be loosely interfaced with some other mass market, generic accounting software. The CellSell platform, our platform, is different. We implement an entirely different variety of fully integrated systems. For example if you’re running standalone software and your double-keying, or your exporting and importing your financial data, from one system to the other, this requires resources and oversight, in order to validate numbers, you need to do a lot of back and forth reconciliation between systems to arrive at accurate financial reporting. It's costly and modern retailers of cellular phones recognize that there is too much risk associated with running financials in this way, so they look to us for an integrated solution.
For more information, visit www.cellsell.com.