SMB On Location Progress Report: Torelli in the 'Sandbox'SMB On Location Progress Report: Torelli in the 'Sandbox'

If you drop in on Torelli Bicycle Co. headquarters in North Hollywood, Calif., these days, you'll find CEO Todd Linscott and the rest of Team Torelli spending every spare moment reveling in their new "sandbox."This sandbox is no plaything, however. It's actually a very sophisticated test bed containing Torelli's critical business data, reconstructed on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution from SAP.

The sandbox environment was created through the efforts of Applications Consultant Greg Woodward and his colleagues at Navigator Business Solutions, an SAP partner that specializes in ERP implementations for small and midsize businesses, or SMBs. (Check out Greg's video blog, where he describes the process of exporting Torelli's dealer and product data from the company's legacy accounting application, scrubbing it and then importing the information into the new SAP environment.)

Establishing the sandbox is a landmark event at Torelli, paving the way for the company to enter a new era of operational efficiency, according to Linscott. In a video interview, the CEO explains the significance of finally gaining real-time visibility to the company's actual business data.

"The sandbox is essentially a playground for the baseline Torelli information," Linscott says. "We can now start logging into the hosted environment that's been set up for us, so we can start working with the baseline item and customer data. Over the next week we'll be able to have access to that."

In the coming weeks, we'll watch as Torelli transforms itself into a data-driven small enterprise, capable of responding to its customers and adapting to changing market conditions with a speed and agility that Torelli executives thought could only be experienced riding one of their blazingly fast Italian-made road bikes.

Do you have a question for Todd and Team Torelli -- or perhaps even a word of warning as they prepare to transition from playing in their high-tech sandbox to actually moving their day-to-day business operations into the SAP environment? Please share your thoughts, and stay tuned as Torelli Bicycle Co. sets out on the technology ride of its life.