Technology Guide: Application Solutions

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Contents

Customer Relationship Management

Contact Centre Management

Supply Chain Management

Customer Relationship Management

There are two types of CRM software suppliers:

•     CRM suite suppliers

•     CRM point solution suppliers

CRM Suite Suppliers

CRM suite suppliers offer a suite of CRM products that implements all the key customer-facing, customer-touching, and customer-centric intelligence applications. While application functionality varies across the suite, some products offering richer functionality than others. Suites usually have the advantages of providing a single and consistent view of the customer, integration across touchpoints, a single architecture, and support from a single vendor. The leading CRM suite suppliers are Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP. E.piphany also provides a CRM suite that imple-ments all the CRM applications except e-commerce as do a number of smaller players such as Talisma. Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP have the additional advantage of tight integration between CRM applications and their ERP and supply chain applications, facilitating the automation of the business processes that support marketing, sales, and service.

CRM Point Solution Suppliers

CRM point solution suppliers offer products that implement one or two CRM applications. The advantages of a point solution approach are the ability to implement best-in-breed functionality and the ease of adding incremental applications to existing CRM environments. There are dozens of CRM point solution suppliers. For example, NCR and Unica offer products that implement customer-centric intelligence applications. MarketFirst and Revenio spe-cialise in marketing automation solutions, and companies such as SalesLogix focus on SFA tools.

Selecting CRM Products

Given the array of supplier types, the very large number of available products, and the strategic nature of the applications that they implement, your selection of CRM products is a critical and potentially complex decision. These are the critical decision factors to consider when making your product choices:

•    FUNCTIONALITY. What the products do should closely reflect the way that you do business.

•    SINGLE AND CONSISTENT CUSTOMER VIEW. The products should minimise your efforts to integrate and synchronize customer in-formation.

•    INTEGRATION ACROSS TOUCHPOINTS. You’ve got to provide a consistent customer experience. You don’t want to code it yourself.

•    AUTOMATION OF SUPPORTING BUSINESS PROCESSES. The tighter the integration with back-office and supply chain systems, the better the customer experience. This integration is about the most complex task in CRM implementation. The more that’s “in the box,” the better.

Managing customer relationships—which is, after all, what CRM is all about—is not simply a group of applications, nor should we be focused on technology. For a detailed management guide focusing on CRM, click here.

Leading CRM Suite Providers

• Siebel 7
• Onyx Customer Relationship Management
• Oracle ebusiness suite
• Peoplesoft 8 CRM
• SAP mySAP

Contact Centre Management

Also known as “Call Centre Management” or “Contact Management”, they are telephony applications that support marketing, sales, and service-all the CRM business processes. These applications implement telemarketing, telesales, and teleservice functions. Telemarketing is usually an outbound activity-your telemarketing reps contact your customers. Teleservice is typically an inbound activity-your customers contact your support centre and speak with your customer support reps. Telesales may be either an inbound or outbound activity. Telemarketing presents offers to leads, prospects, and customers using predefined scripts. Telesales presents product information and quotes to prospects and customers or responds to customer requests with product information and quotes. Teleservice responds to requests with service instructions found in a knowledge base or with incidents that represents requests for service that can't be handled through the contact centre. Contact Management provides instant, company-wide access to detailed and integrated contact information and facilitate collaboration between sales, service, and marketing teams.

Contact centre solution should be able to manage campaigns, such as service contract programmes, and insurance applications.  Campaigns should be custom designed without time-consuming programming, such as user-friendly application development tools for campaign, script (to use during calls) and list management.  Contact centre solutions should go beyond the capabilities of standard outbound predictive dialling systems to add features like inbound automated call distribution (ACD) and true call blending, the seamless integration of inbound and outbound contacts.

Leading Solution Providers

• Siebel 7
• Avaya Interaction Center
• Aspect Enterprise Contact Server
• Genesys G6 Suite

Supply Chain Management

Most vendors’ applications cover the broad range of supply-chain activities. The standard list of supply-chain activities has traditionally been put into four broad areas: planning, sourcing, manufacturing and delivery (or execution). There are two new categories — managing, which includes a growing list of inter-enterprise processes, and selling, which includes all the customer-facing tasks that support online selling and customer-service. Most vendors offer solutions in one or more of the following areas:

1. Planning (Advanced planning and scheduling, Optimisation, Distribution planning, Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment)

2. Sourcing (Indirect or MRO e-procurement, Direct material sourcing, Supplier relationship management)

3. Manufacturing (Product life cycle management, Enterprise asset management, Enterprise production management, Collaborative framework, Supply-chain control, Product development management)

4. Management (Supply-chain event management,  Process management, Supply-chain visibility, End-to-end supply-chain suites)

5. Execution (Fulfilment, Logistics collaboration, Transportation management, Transportation procurement, Global trade management)

6. Selling (E-commerce platforms, Catalog management, Order management, Customer-relationship management).

For a list of leading SCM vendors, check out the Supply Chain e-Business Top 100 list at the website SupplyChainBrain.com.

Click here for a detailed management guide focusing on SCM.

Leading Solution Providers

• SAP mySAP
• Oracle ebusiness suite
• JD Edwards OneWorld
• Peoplesoft 8
• Intentia Movex Supply Chain