5 things you need to know about Silver Creek Technologies

Business Journal of Tri-Cities Tennessee/Virginia
February 2008 issue

Silver Creek Technologies has morphed repeatedly since its founding in 1991. In the mid-1990s, for instance, the firm was writing software for the legal profession. Then Gene Maddox, chairman and CTO, shifted the company into broader-based custom programming. Longtime Business Journal readers may remember his byline from an IT column he penned in the late 1990s. Today, under the guidance of Maddox and David Boshears, president, Silver Creek is big into human resources, or as the company refers to it, "People Resource Management" software.

1. Don't call them "The Milkmen"...

...even though Maddox and Boshears did start their careers working for Pet Dairy in Johnson City years and years ago. It's their depth of knowledge of the food industry that has given them an "in" with their biggest clients.

"We started working with Thom Crosby and Pal's back in 1998," Maddox says. "They were using pencil and paper and a few spreadsheets at that point, and we built them a whole back office system. We handled recipes, inventory, hiring, training, performance management and even accounting functions. When I first met Crosby, he told me they were going for the Baldrige Award. I thought, 'Yeah, sure you are, you and your little hot dog stand.' We'd worked with Eastman quite a bit when they were going for the Baldrige and we knew the work involved. We associated it with big companies. As soon as we got into Pal's, though, we saw the systems they had and knew they could do it."

2. The Malcolm Baldrige Award was great for Pal's. It was just as good for Silver Creek.

"After Pal's won the Baldrige," remembers Maddox, "we began looking at whether there was some commercial potential in the things that we'd built for them. I worked closely with Thom, and he knew they'd be getting a lot of publicity. So we started poking around the marketplace talking with other restaurant companies."

It turned out that the product that Silver Creek had created for Pal's did much more than most restaurant companies needed. "Companies would tell us, 'we've already got a good inventory system." he says. "We've already got a good recipe system. We've already got good accounting in place.' But we kept hearing those same people say, 'I can't believe what Pal's has done with its people. How did they cut their turnover so drastically? How have they been able to take an hourly workforce and make them the fastest service time workforce in the industry?' We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that the interest in the marketplace was in the people area of what Pal's had done, so we started focusing on that."

From that realization grew the Sysdine People Resource Management system, Silver Creek's bread and butter product line.

3.They aren't afraid to make gutsy calls ahead of the pack.

About three and a half years ago, the first hints that applications for business would be moving to web-based formats began to appear. It caused some sleepless nights, but the decision was made to totally rewrite Silver Creek's products to transition from a Windows-base to a web-base. "That has turned out to be one of the best, if not the best decision we've ever made," Maddox says.

"Especially in restaurants you had so many technology barriers in place. You know, to update software for a restaurant in Colorado with Windows-based software, you had to send CDs to them. Well, they might or might not install those properly. They had trouble communicating from stores to headquarters. So going from a Windows-based system to a web-based system was just a revelation."

The marketing of the system then became much easier as well. "We can telephone out of here and hook them into our central server in Kentucky and cut our marketing costs while marketing all over the country," says Boshears. "The web-base lets us contact someone today and have them up and running tomorrow. We have clients today that we've had for two years that we've never been on-site. These days it's pretty common. Even Microsoft has had to move in that direction because of threats from Google and others who were taking their business. But we jumped out way ahead of the curve on that. We spent a lot of money, taking manhours of time into account, we spent well into the six figures to do something that at the time very few people were doing."

4. Now they've honed in on their core competency: hiring.

"We're selling a process," says Boshears. "The process of hiring is one that many companies struggle with, particularly with hourly wage workers. Our process starts with an online application, so the information gets straight to the person who needs to see it immediately. Then we've added some things with it, such as a pre-employment attitude survey. It's a 60-question survey that talks about things like work ethic. We can compare the results of that survey to a database that we started building years ago with Pal's and see how the applicant's responses compare to applicants in the past who ended up performing well for a similar company."

"And of course, the client can set it up so that they can test for relevant skills. They may want math. They may want communication skills. They might want a skills exam," Maddox says. "Most of our customers have gone with a pretty lengthy application. If the applicant won't take the time to fill it all the way out, that eliminates a potential problem employee right there. That person is impatient and probably lazy. You're better off without them, so it helps the customer to weed them out right away. It's a nice screen for the customer. It weeds out about 30 percent of potential applicants."

5.Today Silver Creek is moving Sysdine beyond the food industry.

"Our first extension has been into the convenience store industry," says Boshears. "We're starting to work harder in that industry because of the natural tie-ins between fast food and convenience stores. Both have a high hourly workforce percentage with a good deal of turnover. That's a natural step-over. Honestly, the thing we do in helping hire someone works in many industries. Just about anywhere you have blue-collar hiring, this will work. We think our product is transferable to manufacturing plants, to health care where they hire a lot of CNAs and LPNs that are not salaried people. We're looking to get a foothold there, and if we do, then you'll see us marketing more in the Tri-Cities. We've already talked with people like American Water Heater and Nuclear Fuel Services who hire a lot of people. Our DNA may come from Pal's, but this product is flexible and we're starting to see what we can really do."