Since the mid-1990s, specialty chemicals manufacturer Dow Corning Corp., like many manufacturers, has been struggling to realize a return on its investment in customer relationship management (CRM) software. While the company's CRM deployment had been fairly effective at supporting sales force automation activities, such as contact management and lead tracking, its customer management requirements had grown well beyond that. With an increasingly global customer base, a complex and highly customized product to sell, and a multi-tier channel to support, Dow Corning needed CRM to be tightly integrated with other enterprise systems and to support a wide range of customer-support processes.
"We started to question whether you can get any ROI out of CRM as strictly a sales force automation exercise," says Chip Reeves, director of marketing and sales processes at Dow Corning.
So, just over a year ago, the company decided to reframe its CRM initiative, turning customer relationship management at Dow Corning from something that was narrowly sales force automation-focused and isolated into a set of processes that are more integrated with the rest of the enterprise and more broadly aimed at helping salespeople and sales management do things like prepare to call on customers, get access to pricing and product documentation, manage samples, and even brainstorm with customers and engineers on the company's next new products.
"We are reframing CRM in a way that exposes a lot more information to the selling function, starting with sales management," Reeves says.
Dow Corning certainly isn't the only manufacturing company that has had mixed feelings about its CRM efforts to date. Many companies have invested in CRM software only to discover that, because the functionality doesn't match the user requirements, utilization suffers. As a result, CRM at many organizations — particularly process manufacturers — is often deemed a failure.
Dow Corning's push to refashion CRM started in September 2006, when the company decided to replace its Siebel 7.5.3 CRM applications with SAP's enterprise CRM package. Behind the switch was Dow Corning's desire to more easily integrate CRM data with data from order management, engineering, and other functions. The company has deployed SAP's applications as its ERP backbone, deployed as a single instance serving the company's 47 plants and warehouses worldwide. The company also uses SAP's Business Warehouse tool. The plan, Reeves says, was to integrate data from the company's CRM and other systems in the Business Warehouse.
Dow Corning officials soon realized that, with CRM and ERP running on the same enterprise backbone, they had a chance to expand CRM's scope by more tightly linking sales processes with other enterprise processes.
"We have a robust integrated back end to plug into and a globally integrated supply chain that we can see into and understand," Reeves says. "We saw an opportunity to facilitate a lot of cross-functional team collaboration. That's a big part of what set this off."
Reeves' group began interviewing salespeople and sales managers to determine what information and processes they needed to do their jobs better. They began to put together a series of workflows and reports that pull data from a total of 17 Dow Corning back-end systems to support the sales staff. Using the Exchange Infrastructure piece of SAP's NetWeaver, Reeves' team pulled data from financial, order management, product information, and other modules, giving sales employees access to territory performance, sales margin, open order, and days sales outstanding reports.
They also created workflows that pull together data in support of specific, common sales activities. One, for example, prepares salespeople for customer calls by providing access to a variety of order history and other customer-specific data. Another pulls data from inventory, order management, and other systems to help salespeople manage product samples.
Sharing Product Ideas
Dow Corning has even begun to integrate CRM with the company's engineering group by giving salespeople tools for collaborating on new product ideas. When a salesperson receives a customer request that has the potential to lead to a new product opportunity for Dow Corning, he or she can click on a button that brings up an Outlook or Web form. After the salesperson enters the customer information and new product idea, the information is routed to the correct individuals in engineering for their review and collaboration.
Salespeople access these new reports and workflows through personalized portals that Reeves' team built using SAP's Enterprise Portal tool. After logging in using a common single sign-on screen, sales managers see reports, tasks, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for which they are responsible. Dow Corning has also added access to the new reports and workflows from mobile Blackberry PDA devices.
Over the next 12 to 18 months, Dow Corning plans to use the portal-based user interface and new tools to begin to simplify some processes, such as how the company gets sales lead information quickly to distribution partners, Reeves says.
Perhaps not surprisingly, soon after Dow Corning rolled out the new portal-based CRM tools, utilization by the company's sales organization dropped. That happened, Reeves says, because some users resisted changing to the new system, and, in some cases, there were system response time problems. Those problems have been fixed, and users have become more familiar with the system, Reeves says. Within three to four months after deployment, he says, utilization returned to normal and is now higher than it was with the old system.
Dow Corning hasn't yet attempted to measure the ROI from the new CRM system in terms of improved sales or sales effectiveness. That will happen beginning in the middle of next year.
In the long run, Reeves says, the kind of integration and cross-functional collaboration that have driven Dow Corning's reframing of CRM will change the way companies like Dow Corning think about the role of sales in the organization. "It will start to change the game," Reeves says. "It will cause companies to rethink how their selling efforts need to be supported by other functions, such as engineering and supply chain."
In the meantime, Reeves says he hopes CRM software vendors will break out of their tight focus on sales force automation and begin to deliver some of the integrated workflows and cross-functional capabilities that Dow Corning has built for itself.
"We're hoping we'll see more of that play out over the next couple of years as other companies want to do similar things," Reeves says.