Meet the Prophix Customer Advisory Board

In the age of social media, it’s often easy to lose sight of more traditional forms of communications.  I am still a huge fan of face to face meetings where you have an opportunity to sit down and listen to each other directly. The product planning team at Prophix takes many opportunities to meet with customers directly.  A group we meet with regularly is the Prophix Customer Advisory Board.

The Prophix Customer Advisory Board (CAB) was born 7 years ago at an inaugural meeting in San Diego, California, during the annual Prophix User Conference. At the time, with the number of customers eclipsing 1200, it became crucial to create more formal processes for gathering feedback from our customers and testing new product concepts.

The CAB charter is to have customers share how they are using Prophix in the “real world”, where they are going with the product, and for Prophix to share with members current and future plans. Customers are a strategic partner in our product evolution, and help with our strategy of productization.

With rotating annual memberships, the CAB is comprised of individuals who are leaders and champions of change within their own organizations.  The diversity of members is what I have found to be valuable during discussions as multiple viewpoints can be considered when tackling an issue, resulting in balanced solutions.  For product planning, establishing balance is vital as we want to develop capabilities in Prophix that can serve multiple business applications from a unified solution.

I feel indebted to the customers who have contributed their time not only to attend our regular meetings, but for the countless hours spent reviewing product requirement documents, participating in calls, and testing early versions of new releases.  The CAB has been a tremendous resource over the past seven years, contributing to the refinement and successful release of Prophix 10 R2, Prophix 10 R3, Detailed Planning Manager, Prophix 11, Prophix for Excel, Prophix Mobile , and countless other user experience improvements.

2014 Prophix Customer Advisory Board

The first CAB meeting of 2014 was recently completed in Washington, D.C. during the Annual Prophix User Conference. I would like to thank our 2014 CAB members for attending this special pre-conference meeting on Sunday. As usual, the day was filled with many focused discussions on emerging market trends and specific product ideas.