CRM As A Service for Supply Chain Management: The SLMA

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CRM As A Service for Supply Chain Management

Ian Moyes, Sales Director Workbooks.com | Articles > From the section: CRM

October, 2014 |

- Sales Director, www.workbooks.com
Eurocloud UK Board Member & Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been a hyped acronym for many years and can mean many things to many people. Many debates abound in this area from if it is the correct terminology to describe what its used for, how much does it really cost, what ROI can really be achieved, how to get users to adopt its use, routes to market to sell it and what CRM is right for your own business.

The fundamentals are that CRM provides a way to manage customer information, share it securely, track customer interactions and record activities across the business is required by most business sectors and sizes. Sure there are nuances by vertical and specific requirements that at times can be better served by specialised applications, but for the masses the requirements are pretty similar and easy to achieve.

Another shift is that this market is increasingly fulfilled by cloud solutions, where according to Gartner Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery of CRM applications represented 34% of total worldwide CRM application spending in 2011 and more than 50% of all Sales Force Automation (SFA) spending was on the SaaS platform. So Cloud CRM is at the tipping point of outweighing on network solutions in the not too distant future and becoming the defacto form factor of delivery.

How does this effect supply channels and why does cloud change the possibilities and potentials in this arena? Increasingly there are a number of fundamental needs in supply chains that a good CRM can assist with aiding top and bottom line business benefits.

Recording relationships between multiple parties of suppliers, customers, contractors, alliances and consultants is an important part of understanding a supply ecosystem. Knowing who your supplier options are, who they have relationships with and who they compete with can aid in faster and more effective business decisions. Organisations and how they relate today is ever more complex with contractors working for multiple companies, directors being on the board of multiple organisations and sister, parent and subsidiary company relationships increasingly being important to understand. A CRM should make it easy to record these relationships between people to people, organisation to organisation and people to organisations, thus making it easy to spot relationships that could be important to not overlook and enabling you to leverage these where you might not have spotted them before.

A challenge with CRM systems across supply channels is that invariably they will all adopt a CRM specific to their needs and not wish to coordinate or have a system enforced upon them by other companies, meaning a mix of CRM systems will be used throughout that supply channel. So having the same shared CRM is unlikely to happen, particularly where larger companies will likely afford the big brand and big cost CRM systems that the smaller to mid size firms can ill afford to license let alone deploy and configure. These however can easily be integrated using simple methods of export and import templates being configured which once done can allow regular manual or automated passing of details from one to another.

Consider also exposing your CRM details to customers and suppliers through other means. Imagine having partners able to manage and update their own details, to update product books or product information for example or be able to track leads and opportunities you are working on their products without having to ask you to produce labour intensive reports. How about allowing customers to view and update their support calls, to view their renewal or transaction details online directly fed from your CRM system and to deal register their opportunities with you without re-keying. With a good web based CRM you can either give such a customer or supplier a login to your CRM with locked down secure access to only their data or expose the relevant date to them only through a secure self-service web portal. This latter option meaning no CRM license is needed by the external company and that they do not need to know your CRM or have it forced upon them.

Consider also the ability to aggregate and expose transactions to customers and suppliers where some CRM systems can process quotes, orders, invoices and supplier orders all inside the CRM system itself. This enables you to map a customer order through to selecting a supplier option with supply pricing all from within the one system that maintains both customer and supplier details. This also gives benefits such as allowing the easy visibility and reporting of sales margins, supplier reports, product analysis and more all with easy visibility to sales and marketing without any need to ply requests for information from the finance department.

Utilising a Software as a Service CRM system can allow far more flexibility across supply channels and easier access to sharing information between businesses and within your own company.

When selecting a CRM ensure that you consider a wider range of possibilities and ensure that you approach the project with these directives of best practise in mind;

Ensure you have clarity on the project objectives from your relevant departments
Employ internal Executive Sponsorship to ensure the CRM project is driven and will happen
Ensure user involvement during planning, what would improve their success?
Understand that gaining User Adoption is critical, choose a proven system.
Do not blindly recreate existing processes in a new system (without review/appraisal)
Consider which vendor you will partner with and their support and track record.