Lecture 12

Enterprise Systems
Email: rao.sana10@yahoo.com
 Customer Relationship Management
 Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions
with its customers and sales prospects. Often CRM is equated with a software or technology.
While it is true that CRM involves using technology to organize and automate business
processes related to sales, marketing, customer service and technical support, it is not just about
technology as it involves strategy with the overall goal to find, attract, and win new customers,
retaining those customers and finally getting feedback from them to better design company’s
product.

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 CRM Benefits
Customer Relationship management applications can help companies in different ways. CRM can help
companies in different ways:
1. Better cross-selling and up-selling opportunities:
CRM increases cross-selling and up-selling opportunity. If a particular product is not available in stock,
the company’s sales staff can immediately recommend the best possible alternate (cross-sell) or a premium
product (up-sell). These products are already profiled in CRM application and is available to the sales staff.
2. Improved customer service and customer satisfaction:
CRM field service application is targeted at providing customers better service. A good CRM system
will give your company the ability to send customers regular emails, letting them know about new products,
upcoming promotions or special offers. You can track your clients’ activities, conversations and purchases,
and special occasions such as birthdays, allowing your business to target them with the right messaging.

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3. Better opportunity close rates
It is a good way for sales managers to measure performance. The higher the close rate, the better your team
is at converting opportunities into revenue. Close rate measures how efficiently a salesperson is performing.
4. More focused customer targeting and focused marketing campaigns:
CRM helps in more targeted campaign based on particular customer’s past purchase pattern and spending
potential. CRM has made the dream of “One-to-One marketing” a reality by using technology, i.e., targeting
individual customer with special product, special price, and special promotion.
5. Reduced support and service expenses
CRM applications like sales force automation and field service can help in automating a lot of routine
manual sales and enable self-service by customers themselves. Following a set of FAQ, the clients themselves
can solve the problem that they were facing with their new item, then the field service engineer need not visit
them and that saves money for the company.

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6. Better revenue per customer
CRM analytics capability helps identifying a company’s most profitable customers. This is
important as for any company there are always some customers who are more important than
others. There can be specific strategy for targeting them, i.e., specialized sales promotion offers.
This can be lead to additional revenue opportunities.
7. Increased customer loyalty
CRM applications help better customer loyalty and repeat business from the same customer.
Companies know that owing a new customer is ten times more costly then retaining an existing
customer.

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 CRM – Different Application Areas
1. Sales Force Automation (SFA) Applications
These applications are to help sales force in their daily jobs and aimed at increasing their
productivity. The main features of a SFA system are contact management and opportunity
management, together with email integration, task management and diary sharing.
2. Field Service Application
These applications typically helps in different after sales service functions, i.e., helps managing
installation, service, or repairs of systems or equipment, activities that are typically performed at
customer sites based on warranty, or annual maintenance. These solutions also support scheduling
workforce, i.e., which worker should go to which customer site and attend which type of problem
based on worker’s availability and skill.

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3. e-Commerce Applications
These applications help companies to buy, sell, and do other transactions over the web. Today,
companies use these applications for a variety of purposes like product search, buying through
shopping cart, product promotion, cross-sell and up-sell, etc. Today e-commerce is becoming even
more powerful. Different areas of e-commerce are:
 Online ordering
 Online auctions
 Online billing and payment

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4. Call Center
These solutions provide customer support by answering different types of customer queries and
routing the calls to the most competent person who can handle it. These are made possible by a
variety of technologies like automatic call distributors (ACD), etc. These applications help
companies to automate customer service inquiries through automatically identifying and
segmenting callers, routing inquiries according to the customer profile. Today’s call center
solutions provide automated call center capabilities by enabling customers to use the keys on a
touch-tone phone to access information such as bank account balance, flight arrival and departure
times, and package delivery status.

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 Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Applications
These applications help companies to manage relationship with partners. These solutions can help
in different important activities required for working with third-party selling partners. Important
capabilities of partner relationship management software are:
1. Partner addition:
PRM solutions can register and add new partners and can capture partner information.
2. Partner Profiling
It helps in profiling its partners i.e., what type of partner it is.
3. Special partner discounts
PRM solutions can propose special discount for partners based on their past performance. Such
discounts need to follow special approval process.

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 Supplier Relationship Management
 It is not one single software, but an umbrella term that refers to a set of technologies that make
procurement process more efficient.
 SRM applications solve different types of sourcing problems for different types of users using
various types of technologies like shopping cart, procurement card, etc. While employees can
buy directly office supplies through e-Procurement.

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 Important Application areas of Supplier relationship management
1. Electronic Procurement
Electronic procurement which started as a procurement option for low cost supplies, becoming popular for procuring
direct production items for its speed and cost effectiveness.
 E-Procurement Options
There are different ways an electronic procurement can happen. Most common technology options available for e-
procurement are:
 Electronic shopping carts
 Procurement Card
Electronic shopping carts
Shopping cart is a common e-Procurement technology used by employees for procurement of goods and services.
Employees can create shopping cart by searching products in electronic catalogues, start the shopping process, check the
procurement status at any time, confirm goods and services once that is delivered and can then enter invoice for their
purchase order.

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A typical electronic procurement can have following steps:
1. Create shopping cart: The first step in creating shopping cart is to find out a suitable product which meets the
requirement of employees. Shopping carts provide several features to facilitate this search like: catalogue, and
special request.
2. Shopping Cart Approval: Once the shopping cart is created, e-procurement solutions checks whether the same needs
to be approved and if one or more people in the organization need to approve the shopping cart, the solution sends
email to all those people concerned.
3. Purchase Order: The approved shopping cart can create a purchase order either in e-procurement system. Purchase
order can be sent to vendors electronically or physically. A soon as the goods are delivered, the system starts a
workflow and a mail triggers in the employee’s inbox informing that the goods had come and requested him to
inspect the same and approve.
4. Invoice Payment: e-procurement solutions offer different options of entering invoices. Vendors can enter the invoice
in the system which, in turn, triggers the invoice come to employee’s inbox for their approval. Once the employee
approves the invoice, the document is transferred to the financial accounting systems for further processing.

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- Procurement Card
Procurement card can be used as a payment method in e-procurement systems. Procurement cards are credit cards offered
by companies like American Express and Visa whose invoices can go to the employee or corporate and using these cards
employees can do procurement. If the employee wants to pay through procurement cards, the card information must be
entered into the system while creating a user.
Process of e-procurement card
1. Specify the procurement card payment needs
2. Vendor sends the bills to the card company
3. The card company sends the bank statement to e-procurement system.
4. E-procurement system generates an invoice in the backend ERP system.
5. This invoice triggers an approval and the cardholder gets a system generated e-mail to check the charges and approve
the invoice.
6. Once he approve the amount, the amount gets transferred to the backend system for payment to the card company.
7. Procurement card has a transaction limit and if the shopping cart amount is higher than this limit then it is not to save
the shopping cart.

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