Going Beyond ERP

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Enterprise segment has made significant investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) as well as customer relationship management (CRM)

Enterprise segment has made significant investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) as well as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and now they are looking at going beyond the ERP domain.

When we talk about automation, economic resource planning comes into picture and ERP or CRM packages are designed to automate core business processes such as manufacturing, finance and sales operations, while managing critical master data on products, customers and transactions. Enterprise segment is fast in terms of moving beyond ERP or CRM and looking at integrating their profit generating applications with ERP solutions.

Companies, big or small are finding ways to leverage and extend these systems in order to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction and increase channel effectiveness and efficiency. Customer is the king today and one of the biggest differentiator in today’s ever changing market dynamics. Those customers who receive the best quality of service, products, pricing and brand experience are most likely to become an organization’s most profitable assets on the long run.

Over the past many years, different organizations have made significant investments in ERP and CRM systems to optimize business processes and get a single view of their customers.

ERP or CRM systems manage key business data, which involves everything from price lists to product catalogs to customer master data. This information is critical for conducting eBusiness transactions with customers and business partners. However, they were never designed to be customer-facing and lack critical eBusiness capabilities such as catalog content management, needs analysis, interactive and guided selling, sales configuration, multisupplier order management and Web self-service. They also lack the flexibility and ability to provide each user segment with their own personalized experience, including customer-specific catalogs, pricing and order process flows. Modifying and extending ERP systems to support these sophisticated eBusiness capabilities is a very expensive process. However, companies are executing these processes in order to move beyond plain and vanilla ERP systems.

What should be done?

Enterprises should accelerate investment in upgrading their eBusiness/eCommerce platforms and organizations involved in B2B commerce should focus their investments in technology that further reduces the human touch needed to complete their orders. This could surely ensure that they move in the right direction towards better profitability.

In such a scenario, an ideal eBusiness platform would deliver consistent, personalized information about products and services, inventory, pricing, terms and conditions, service options and other vital areas across any channel—Web, phone, mail, or through XML or EDI links—to internal users as well as to customers and partners (resellers, distributors and suppliers) across the entire extended value chain.

Working in tandem with the long term goals of the company, eBusiness applications should expand the traditional boundaries of ERP and CRM systems, automate the sales and ordering process to save time and money, and make it easier for the company’s customers to do business with it. Such a system would show a unified face to the customer by hiding all the complexity of the seller’s operation from the customer or partner, giving them a single view of important information and processes rather than forcing them to deal with their internal business systems and processes.