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MEPCENTER.com is the culmination of an idea that was driven by necessity.
Two years ago the Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership (AMEP), in its
third iteration, was far from meeting it’s minimally acceptable impact
metrics. Our stakeholders at NIST MEP and the Alaska Department of
Commerce knew that meeting our MAIM’s would be difficult in such a
huge rural region that has less than 500 manufacturers. That is
less than one manufacturer per 1000 square miles! Our stakeholders
all had a similar message: “Create a system that ties Alaskan
businesses together where their products can be seen and purchased
by anyone anywhere in the world, make it robust but inexpensive with
no incremental rate increases, it must easy to use so that micro-enterprises
and small businesses can manage it themselves regardless of their computer
skill level, and it must not consume a percentage of profits.” And our
state stakeholders added three caveats: “Make it open to all kinds of
businesses, not just manufacturers, make sure lots of small businesses
get loaded, and make sure Alaskan businesses get found!”
We knew we did not have the expertise on staff to create such a thing,
nor did we have the money to fund the creation of such a system.
First we looked around to see if there was anything on the market that
met our needs and there was not. We then began to look for partners to
help with the creation, but ran into brick walls when they found out there
was no development funding. In the end we used our connections in the
travel & tourism market to partner with us and build the solution...(this
becomes key in our marketing strategy). Our new partner, EntertainMe
Alaska which is part of the EntertainMe World network of over 150 sites
that provide travel and tourism packages where you can buy airline tickets,
hotels, book golf tee times, and take a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon.
Our new partners estimate for software development came it at 1.5Million.
AMEP could only put a few thousand toward this price and our plan was to
recoup the costs later. Our partner ended up spending 2.7Million (to date)
to create the system that we asked for.
The first thing we noticed after the launch of the ecommerce portal was that
the clients we were loading moved up in the search engine rankings very quickly.
The search engine optimization work that was done on the system was astounding
as our clients started showing up in the top ten of Google and Yahoo within weeks
and sometimes only days of being loaded. Those clients that already had websites
saw a dramatic increase in traffic as they linked into the system and their old
sites shot up in the rankings as well.
We knew this was a tool that could not only impact AMEP, but could also be used
nationwide to help other centers meet the needs of their clients. Our first
thought was to sell licenses for the software to the other MEP centers and recoup
some of our development costs, but were told that instead we should seek to partner
with other centers, share the programming and hope that they have something to share
back with Alaska. In fact we were told, “Do not try to become a vender to the other centers.”
This created a dilemma for us and we returned to our partner to get an add-on to the
system so that the other MEP Centers could very simply log on to the network and
create their own portal that could be up and ready within an hour to be loading
clients...without any of the site development costs.
So here it is!!!! A full end-to-end ecommerce platform that does it all....ecommerce,
up to eight minutes of streaming video for each client, search engine optimization,
low cost, and simple to use. We at AMEP have paid for it, along with our partner,
and it is open for you to use. There is even a section where centers can give input
to the programmers for additional ideas on ways to serve our clients better.
Sincerely
Thomas A. Myers
Chief Learning Officer/Senior Business Consultant
Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership 907-279-2637
P.S. We met our MAIM’s for the first time!
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