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Products for the Planet
Originally Published in the Standard-Freeholder
 What do Italy, Saudi Arabia, China, and Morocco have in common? How about England, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia? In all those countries, you can find invoices from Busitech, a Cornwall software company with international appeal. They do business in over 40 countries, pushing a product that makes the manufacturing process more efficient.
In 1985 Peter Gault was working at Domtar when he decided to start a business computer consulting company. He and a partner took "busi" from business and "tech" from the technical end of the consulting process to make Busitech, a company that would grow over a decade from a bit to a byte, to an international success story.
This made-in-Cornwall partnership then developed a product called Quality Window that has been the lifeblood of Busitech's business. In tech talk, it's a piece of "statistical quality control event tracking software." Gault puts it in more simple terms.
"If you're manufacturing cookies, you want to make sure you make the cookie consistently the same way. You are going to set what are called limits... not too heavy, not too light, the right number of chocolate chips."
The manufacturers then take the data and adjust the process to be more consistent. Busitech's software identifies problems, and helps the employee work through them. If the conveyor speed is out of whack, and there's one chip in one cookie and a full load in another, the operator will know about it through Quality Window. And it doesn't matter if the operator can't speak English, because the software is written in a universal language: symbols and colors.
"There's not a Japanese version, not a German, not an Italian," says Gault. "It's all in English, and that's really a tribute to how simple the product is to use. It uses symbols, uses colors, and displays its data graphically, so it's a very comfortable environment for operators. As they enter data, that data is displayed in colors for them. If green comes up on a number, it's fine...if it comes up red or white, you need to do something about it."
Gault says his system reverses the traditional managerial hierarchy. The software is targeted at the shop floor worker, below the duties of the foreman. From the base of the pyramid, the people doing the hands-on manufacturing can monitor problems and graphically chart their progress.
That simple interface is one of the qualities that attracted Busitech's largest client, Procter and Gamble. Products under the parent company and subsidiaries include Pampers and Luv's diapers, Folgers coffee, Tide, and Ivory soap, all household names produced under the watchful eye of Quality Window.
The huge number of suppliers that the multinational manufacturer uses has played a major part in Busitech's worldwide exposure. Gault says Procter and Gamble introduces the software to their suppliers as a quality control measure.
"What they (Procter and Gamble) have said to suppliers is that if you want to manufacture for us, we want to control, make sure your quality is all right," says Gault. "Here's a product, that we use, that we would like you to use. The thing is, Procter and Gamble does carry a lot of weight and when they say we'd like you to do this, I can tell you their suppliers listen."
Most of Busitech's clientele lies outside of Canada, with 75 per cent in the United States and 20 per cent in Europe. But its development doesn't stop there. Coming off a Small Business of the Year award from the Cornwall Chamber of Commerce, the company is pushing forward with strong prospects in South America and a growing relationship with Coca.Cola and Molson Breweries.
With today's technology, the Busitech team can easily serve, from Cornwall, clients from all over the world. Electronically connected to customers through computers, the world wide web and telephones, business is as easily done as if everyone was in the same room.
"With creativity, you don't have to be in Toronto or Montreal for that," points out Gault.
Through its business contracts, Busitech brings people to Cornwall and "they bring dollars to Cornwall, and they are new dollars."
Gault remembers telling one client about the bike path here and she showed up with her bike and travelled from one end of the path to the other. "We have a great community. These people always have positive feedback and they become ambassadors for Cornwall."
Now the Busitech team is developing new products that will streamline the data collection process, and further capitalize on a market that they don't think has been tapped. "Everybody else seems to be creating the Microsoft Word and Excel® products of the world. Nobody seems to be interested in the manufacturing sector, and that's where we seem to have found our home, and where we want to stay."
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