|
by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 3:37:19 PM   | Abstract: | Chasing the promise of electronic commerce, manufacturers ended up with a mishmash of systems and no unified face to the customer. Now many are integrating their systems in order to manage the entire opportunity-to-cash cycle. |
Remember Web 1.0? Among the many misconceptions taken as truth during that era was the notion that electronic commerce tools, such as online product configurators and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, would magically simplify ordering processes for customers and drive growth for manufacturers. At many organizations it didn't work out quite that way, and now executives, such as David Macaulay, senior vice president at diversified manufacturer Siemens AG, are left to clean up the mess. Over the past few years, Macaulay says, systems intended to make it easier for customers to order and for Siemens to track its customer relationships were implemented in a departmental and stand-alone fashion. As a result, he says, Siemens today has some 500 different CRM systems and 100 product configurators spread across the company. And there's little integration among Siemens' customer-facing systems, such as those it uses for CRM and order management. As a result, Macaulay says, Siemens has a hard time getting accurate, up-to-date visibility into company-wide customer ordering patterns, nor can it easily compare different business units in terms of metrics, such as sales effectiveness. "It's even hard for us to know at any given time who are our top 10 customers," Macaulay says. In response, Siemens has embarked on a major, multi-year project intended to allow the company to more effectively manage its end-to-end opportunity-to-cash processes. The first step, now under way, is to drive common customer-related data definitions across the company and to replace disparate CRM systems with a Web-based version of SAP's mySAP CRM platform. In about two years, Siemens will integrate its new CRM environment with the back-office systems and processes it uses to manage customer ordering and fulfillment processes. A data warehouse that combines consistent customer data from the CRM environment and up-to-date order information from Siemens' ERP system will let the company accurately assess things like which sales regions are most effective and whether the company is charging the right prices for its products, something it can't easily do today. Siemens is not the only manufacturer attempting to standardize and integrate the systems and processes used to manage customer-facing operations, such as generating leads, taking and fulfilling orders, configuring products for customers, and coordinating warranty and other post-sales services. As business models become more complex — often involving multiple sales and ordering channels and extended networks of indirect sales partners — manufacturers are quickly realizing they can no longer afford the inefficiencies and lack of visibility that come with disjointed systems and processes. Instead, they want to manage the entire opportunity-to-cash value chain as a unified process with common, integrated systems and data. "The first wave of e-commerce a few years ago saw manufacturers put a bunch of extranets, customer portals, CRM applications, and other systems in place, but a lot of that was done on a departmental level, and it wasn't integrated," says Rob Bois, research director at AMR Research. "What they ended up with was a hodgepodge of systems and ways for customers and partners to interact with them, and that resulted in overlapping and incongruous processes for customer and channel management. They ended up with multiple catalogs for selling, multiple configurators, customer information spread all over the place." Who's in Charge? As manufacturers strive to create consistent, integrated processes and systems to manage the opportunity-to-cash process, however, they often run into significant challenges, experts say. One of the most common barriers to an integrated opportunity-to-cash business process is that no single executive or office is responsible for the smooth operation of the entire process. In fact, in a recent survey of 53 enterprises attempting to deploy integrated order hubs to manage the opportunity-to-cash process, Forrester Research found only one company that had designated a single business owner for the entire cycle. Page : 1 2 3 4 ... NEXT |