Erp Software Vendors

2009-04-08T04:13:00.000-07:00

Erp Software Vendors

How to choose Erp Software Vendors? part I

If you are planing to get a crm to your business there are a few very important things you need to know in order to question and judge your optional vendors before you close the deal with them. Will they know how to relate to these problems and solve them? Choosing an ERP software vendor is like choosing a future business partner. Lets me explain you why...

Many firms consider implementing or already under going an integration of a crm software. The main question is will the new crm really help them to put into action the organization strategy and will it hurt their costumers’ service or their sales? The fear usually comes from a bad experience with different costumer relationship management systems that they tried in the past in order to improve their sales or their service. Most of the systems in a normal firm deal mainly with managing internal resources and not in managing or interacting with costumers which are outside of the organization control and are external to the organization. It comes out that the future crm may have serious implications on the firm’s reputation and financial future. A failure in integrating a new crm mainly in service and sales call centers could become a huge failure in the whole operation of the company. That’s why integrating a crm into your business demands a completely different preparation and procedures than integrating other knowledge managing systems. The first thing you must realize is the unique features and benefits of a crm system and the sensitivity of integrating such a system into your organization, which is very similar to implanting a new heart into ones body. In this article I will focus on the different questions concerning the integration procedure so the process would be done on the best side and in a way that will guarantee that your new crm will create additional profit and wont heart the daily work of your firm by minimizing the risks.

It is very important to understand that there are different types of crms and different types of crm applications and crm functions and you need to treat each crm or a specific crm application individually with all of its needs and solutions. I can identify 7 different crm implementations: call center crm, field technicians crm, telemarketing crm, marketing management crm, analytic crm which creates insights and Bi reports according to the costumer interactions database and a xrm which is a partners and costumers service web based crm.

What are the main obstacles of a successful crm implementation? There are many potential obstacles both functional and technical but I can try to summarize them into 3 main factors which could be overcome easily if your IT department or support would know how to deal with them. In part of the cases the IT wont be able to solve these problems but in most of them, as I seen from my crm integration experience, it could be solved easily. The first obstacle is when the crm isn’t connected directly to the operation systems at all (the worst case is when you can not access any formal information about the costumers or the products through the crm) or if the connection isn’t complete or transparent (meaning that you don’t have to go through the crm but you can by pass it in order to get information). The second obstacle lies in the quality of the information, meaning that the costumer database includes irrelevant or missing info. The third obstacle is a performance problem caused by the many systems and different technologies that the crm must connect to. In most cases these systems and technologies are much more primitive than the crm thus making the crm upgrades and strength become useless.

There are other obstacles, mainly in the organization level and the interaction of the crm with the employees. Even if you have the perfect crm and it works just fine you’ll have to deal with challenges considering the training and human implementations phases. First of all you must realize that a crm will cause your workers to spend more time in entering data into the system. The main point of a good crm is to document every interaction with the client and entering data in the most detailed way, so you could use them later on, in future interactions with the clients. The problem becomes much more critical when the person who enters the data isn’t the one using it thus lacking any interest to enter the whole information in a good way. Another interesting problem that I usually come across is that even the person who is supposed to use the information doesn’t know how to extract most of the information and causes the company not to extract the most of what its got. The problem lies usually in lack of knowledge or proper training about the crm, the lack of knowledge about what information exists in the system or lack of knowledge on how to use this info. These problems become much more dangerous in call centers that work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In these calling centers there is a big turnover of workers which are mostly not so educated and there right solutions must be made.
Sales crms have a different problem as sales persons usually don’t like to share their information: leads, contact people and the status of the transactions. These people can prevent the information from going into the system thus making supervision very problematic. In some firms a strong sale department can even prevent the implementation of a crm, their interest is in the short term profit and they don’t have the patience to wait for the benefits which the crm will give them in the long run.

In conclusion the success of a crm integration depends first and foremost on the people who operate it and the way they use it. Crm systems work when you work with them and not against them. A smart crm demands a smart user. Defining and training the smart user as well as taking care of all the other potential problems we talked about is the job of an ERP software vendor

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Erp Software Vendors