A User Centric WorkWise Customer Conference

We spent some time with the two top guys at WorkWise, Michael Dunham, Chairman and Wayne Wedell, President. They discussed their business model in detail and we were pleased to see how well these execs understand their business, the business model and their dedication to the users.

Dunham has experience as the CEO of a public software company in the 1990s and pointed out the advantages of being a private company and running a company dedicated to existing customers not to the on-going search for new accounts. "Our business objectives and those of our customers are very much in alignment. For example, we drive our development strictly off what our existing customers need. The history of public, new account driven companies has been driving development by responding to the competition or stretching for new markets to chase after even more new accounts."

Wedell has been involved with the TCM product for years starting as an implementation consultant and moving up within the organization in consulting and support management roles. The fact that Wedell has a consulting and support background as compared to the typical sales and marketing background of most software company executives tells us that this business is different. Wedell pointed out, "We are not investing in the sales and marketing required for a new account objective. That yields a significant impact on our P&L, allowing us to invest in efforts that are more closely aligned with what our customers need."


The conference theme was "Taking Care of Business" and WorkWise defined their business as a "Strategic focus on the TCM customer base". In keeping with their focus on the customer base, management noted that they would pursue select, "opportunistic" new sales defined as opportunities with companies that approach WorkWise, normally through the introduction by an existing customer. In the last year, WorkWise added four new customers with this limited approach.

Approximately 300 users attended the conference, held in Milwaukee WI. The two-day event included keynote speakers, breakout sessions, a solution center and post conference training. Also present were application partners offering products and services to extend or enhance TCM.


Key announcements included support for existing customers plus application and technical enhancements. The company announced continued support for all Y2K enabled versions of TCM on all current platforms (Windows, Open VMS and Unix). Although not announced at the conference, customers discussed WorkWise's array of offerings geared to existing users included refreshes and upgrades, modifications, application and technical consulting and a variety of training, including refresher, courses.

Application enhancements include Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) directions plus increased Access to TCM Data via Report Writing and Business Intelligence tools. WorkWise is also enabling Partner Products through TCM Data Import & Export plus Connectivity to the Internet. Applications announced for eCommerce included TCM eSales and TCM eFrontOffice.

Business with Industry Leaders

The third element of Amdocs' marketing revival ploy is a greater reliance on business with industry leaders, which should enable the vendor to better understanding its customers' business needs and provide proactive solutions. For example, in 2004, Amdocs established a new global business relationship with IBM to provide comprehensive, flexible billing, and CRM solutions with an emphasis on telecommunications customers. Under the terms of the agreement, Amdocs and IBM provide telecommunications companies with joint solutions and a range of managed services options based on IBM services expertise, including business process transformation, order management, information technology (IT) management, and additional business process support. The agreement also enables Amdocs and IBM to pursue joint sales opportunities, expand product and services offerings, and share technical expertise.

In addition, new partnerships with smaller niche players, particularly providers of middleware and video services, have helped Amdocs prepare telecommunications companies to sell video services over their IP networks. With these innovative products, Amdocs touts it is ready to help make the triple play (voice, data, and TV) or even a quadruple play (wire line, wireless, data, and TV) a reality for telecommunication companies as they seek to reclaim their leadership in communications. Amdocs believes these moves will help it fend off its chief competitor, Convergys, which in 2001 bought the UK-based billing provider Geneva. Geneva's product remains highly effective in carrying out billing on IP networks, making it one of the world's largest specialist billing companies. Geneva, along with the cable billing operator CSG Systems, are direct competitors of Amdocs. Moreover, many still believe that Convergys might have another edge over Amdocs due to its WIZARD system (which came from the acquisition of former Israeli company Wiztec Solutions). WIZARD does billing for video broadcasts and is aimed at the cable and satellite communications market.

Unified Software Platform

The launch of these new Amdocs consulting services comes on the heels of the second element of Amdocs' marketing overhaul: a first time offering of a unified software platform. In mid-February, Amdocs launched Amdocs 6, a pre-integrated portfolio of modular, billing, CRM, self-service, order management, mediation, and content revenue management software products aimed at easing and accelerating the adoption of the ICM strategy.

According to a recent Amdocs' study, almost 75 percent of surveyed consumers think their CSP only sometimes, seldom, or never understands their needs. Surprisingly, the survey also revealed that 34 percent of women and nearly 20 percent of men would rather give birth than interact with inexperienced or unhelpful customer service representatives. While consumers clearly identified short hold times and friendly staff as key determinants of good customer service, more than 64 percent felt that their providers only improved customer service when faced with the threat of either the loss of business or increased competitive pressure. Quite simply, when offered an ample choice of providers and services, consumers today feel the easiest and best way to express dissatisfaction is to take their business elsewhere.

Therefore, the products in the new Amdocs 6 portfolio are going to be pre-integrated to remove process barriers across the customer life cycle, from targeting, selling, and delivering, to billing and supporting each customer at all touch-points, including the Web, contact center or bill mailing. Technical platform integration aims at reducing implementation costs for service providers and driving a lower TCO. Key products within the Amdocs 6 portfolio include

• Amdocs Billing 6. A fully convergent billing product, designed to meet the evolving needs of the world's largest CSPs prepaid, postpaid, voice, and data billing operations.
  
  
• Amdocs CRM 6 . Delivers out-of-the-box solutions to optimize customer-centric business processes.
  
  
• Amdocs Order Management 6. A scalable order management product designed to meet the complex ordering requirements of CSPs.
  
  
• Amdocs Content Revenue Management 6. Manages the content supply chain from the partner's domain, through the operator's environment, to the end consumer.
  
  
• Amdocs Mediation 6. A single converged system that adapts to diverse requirements and executes large-scale service logic to address CSPs' most urgent objectives: reducing TCO and increasing business agility.

For instance, the self-service system that Amdocs will provide as part of the platform will purportedly enable telecommunications subscribers to self-manage their budgets via the Internet. They will be able to order and change services, change their account information, check the status of a service they have ordered, and so forth. This system provides subscribers with what amounts to an independent and automated customer service center, thereby relieving the operator's customer service center of a great burden.

Also, in order to provide customers with integration between systems, Amdocs has also developed an integrated catalogue, in contrast to the separate ones it has previously used for each system. The integrated catalogue is software that enables operators to define the systems and services that they want to order. At the same time, users can still order each Amdocs system separately, since the vendor has found that most of its customers prefer switching to an integrated system in stages.

A Tectonic Shift in Communications Customer Life Cycle Management

In mid-March, the vendor announced new business consulting services that should help accelerate the ICM-readiness for communications service providers (CSP). In addition to a current broad set of implementation, integration, and managed services that Amdocs provides to customers, the new consulting services include

* Amdocs ICM Blueprint Framework of Services. An overarching framework that includes the Amdocs ICM Benchmark Service and encompasses a wide range of offerings—from high-level strategy to business process integration, training, and testing. They are designed to help CSPs design, plan, and execute their transformation from a voice service utility to a customer-centric, multi-media retailer.

* Amdocs ICM Benchmark Service. Addresses critical business processes that impact the intentional customer experience: target, sell, deliver, bill, and support. The ICM Benchmark Service ensures a comprehensive cross-silo view of the organization, which is a business imperative for achieving true ICM. As a part of the ICM Blueprint Framework, the ICM Benchmark Service was designed to assess current state versus industry benchmarks and best practices toward achieving ICM. To that end, the ICM Benchmark Service will facilitate creation of an ICM strategy and vision based on the customer's unique situation, taking into account investments, goals, competitive environment, etc. It will define the unique ICM vision and strategy of an CSP; measure ICM maturity versus industry best practices across people, processes, and technology; identify and substantiate gaps; and define, size, justify, and prioritize initiatives that can be improved through the Amdocs ROI Methodology. The service leverages the Amdocs Telecom Maturity Tool developed based on a licensed methodology researched and designed by Gartner, Inc.

* Amdocs Contact Center Optimization Service. Focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of contact center operations and self-service capabilities with the emphasis on designing and implementing a customer interaction strategy that delivers an intentional customer experience. The service considers both efficiency and effectiveness of operations and uses modeling and simulation tools to determine the appropriate cost-to-serve, helps elicit the right customer behavior, and maximizes both the perceived value of the interaction to the customer, as well as customer profitability.

* Amdocs Customer Profitability and Segmentation Service. Helps plan and execute an applied segmentation and customer profitability strategy delivering actionable intelligence at the point of decision, while rationalizing and leveraging past business intelligence and marketing automation (MA) investments. This should give CSPs the power to create better-targeted product offers, communications, bundled services, and support approaches.

* Amdocs Billing Operations Improvement Service. Applies Amdocs' decades of accumulated "best practices" so that CSPs can take steps to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their existing operations in areas such as bill cycle time, hardware performance, error handling, service time-to-market, customer satisfaction, and quality.

Customer Relationship Management for IT Professionals

A satisfying relationship between IT and line of business is maintained through ongoing dialogue that is meaningful to both parties. The discipline of "Conversations for Alignment," a title for a simple technique for making and managing commitments, enables such a dialogue. My consulting group and I have done a good deal of research into what makes a strong supplier/customer relationship. The bottom line is trust. However, trust needs to be earned through a series of conversations and commitments that have been met. Buyers tell us they want to be informed, understood, supported, and respected. Suppliers tell us they want the opportunity to assess the value of their offerings to prospective applications, to be treated fairly, and to have the opportunity to make good on commitments.

Note: This note first appeared in a column by James F. Dowling in Mid-Range Computing. Look for other previously published Mid-Range Computing columns by Mr. Dowling at this site or visit Midrange Showcase at www.midrangecomputing.com/showcase/.

If both parties know what they want and if the needs are well aligned, what causes supplier/customer relationship breakdowns? It is that perennial scapegoat named communications. One case study reveals many of the root cause factors. Following is the "Reader's Digest" version.

A financial analyst wanted a file server but knew that the IT architecture disallowed personal servers in favor of workgroup servers (he had been refused before when he requested one in response to frequent disk space outages). He therefore designed a creative way of reducing the corporation's tax liability using a large database, a collection of spreadsheet programs, a data extraction tool, and a file server. The internal rate of return was computed to be more than 500 percent. Hours after submitting his request, the financial analyst was visited by a consultant who had been charged with performing due diligence on the request and guiding the client and IT to a knowledge-based solution selection.

As the consultant asked more questions about the tax issue and the algorithms, the mantra of "500 percent ROI" came frequently. The consultant left the meeting with a clear set of requirements (for the wrong solution). The financial analyst took immediate steps to emphasize the fact that the company was losing money while IT action was slow.

The consultant made a connection between this analyst's solution and a similar situation in two other divisions, and recommended an add-on package to the company's financial administrative system to solve both problems-albeit at a somewhat higher cost and with significantly less complexity. He also recommended that additional data be propagated to the financial analyst's datamart and that his workgroup server be upgraded to provide enough disk space to support the tax computations in the interim. Both parties got more work than they bargained for and the company got a superior solution.

Integrated Collaborative E-business Components

During the late 1990s, however, Intuitive, somewhat painfully like many others, realized that its target market needed more connectivity with business partners than merely an inexpensive and easy-to-use back-office system. To that end, during the last few years, the company has gradually introduced a line of integrated collaborative e-business components within its core ERP solution, such as iCustomer (formerly iTrack), a self-service ASP.NET-based web application that includes an e-commerce web catalog and online order and account, order, and shipment tracking functionality, and WebRemote, a tool for remote sales order entry and retrieval of sales data (such as, the status of their shipments and orders, view a current accounts receivable aging, etc.).

End users of smaller enterprises have also been impressed with the product's intuitive rich-client Windows user interface (UI), which provides ease of system navigation and of information retrieval and analysis, and with underlying workflow and e-mail messaging or on-screen notifying system capabilities. The Ad Hoc Report Wizard module would be the epitome of Intuitive's approach to its users, since no database, pesky query building, field name or programming knowledge is necessary to leverage the module. Instead, all that the users need to know is which fields they want on the report and in what order they want them in. Adding simple or complex calculations is relatively simple, as is formatting the reports with data filters and sorting and grouping options. Also, the reports created by the Ad Hoc Report Wizard feature familiar Microsoft Excel type data display and a one-click "Export to Excel" for easy graphing and distribution.

On the other hand, the AlertMessenger feature provides notification through e-mail, pop-up message boxes, electronic paging systems, or a combination of methods. The idea is to supplant trading phone calls and spending endless time and effort to track down information by proactively and automatically informing employees, vendors, and customers of pre-determined events with customized alert messages. However, this is not as advanced as Exact's e-Synergy and Exact Event Manager products that feature closed-loop business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities that provide escalation mechanism and prevent typical alerts falling though cracks (see Exact Software—Working Diligently Towards the "One Exact" Synergy).

Furthermore along similar lines, Import Wizards have proven to quickly upload a pile of legacy data (such as , customer records) into the Intuitive ERP database, often with an underlying logic of detecting inconsistencies within the legacy data. Another attractive feature that the product offers is its native Microsoft on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and business intelligence system (BIS) capability, as the company has additionally pre-filled a number of data cubes for out-of-the-box data analysis to gain critical insights into financial activity, sales analysis, and production and inventory management.

Also, the Decision Management Tool (DMT) module, which monitors business performance and identifies trends by tracking and analyzing over fifty key performance indicators using data from Intuitive ERP. These indicators (which include return on assets, return on net worth, inventory turns, days aales in AR, current ratios, quick ratios, and many more), are calculated automatically and displayed instantly, while users can compare periods, quarters, or years, and then track the changes in the company's health throughout time. The DMT indicators may be displayed in spreadsheet format or graphically, depending on the preferences, and may be e-mailed, faxed, etc. from within the spreadsheet.

Last but not least, KPIs can be graphically analyzed by management for sales, purchasing, production, financial, and inventory activity by Intuitive Executive Information System (EIS) module, which is a visual reporting system that provides management with real time updates on critical elements of company-wide data in a graphical format. A one-page EIS summary provides a high-level view with drill-down capability for each selected indicator and real time information allows management to examine and graphically report on current bookings levels, vendor performance, inventory valuation, past due work orders, accounts receivable, and accounts payable, and so on.

Extensive Multinational Product Capabilities

Also positively impacting the sales of Intuitive ERP into some dispersed markets worldwide, has been its strong multinational product capabilities, which are atypically strong for a vendor of its stature and stronger than many more visible competitive products (e.g., Made2Manage, Lilly Software Associates, SoftBrands/Fourth Shift, Best Software, etc.). Fully multicurrency enabled, Intuitive ERP allows an unlimited number of currencies including the Euro, currency gains and losses (realized and unrealized), currency transfers, reports written in the vendor or customer's language, default currency by customer and vendor, GL transactions, check writing and support of a goods and services tax (GST) and value added tax (VAT), including a VAT percentage matrix by item or product family.

Intuitive ERP ships with five language options: US and UK English, Spanish, French, and Chinese (simplified Mandarin). Other languages are also available, including Arabic, traditional Chinese, Czech, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. In addition, the Intuitive ERP system architecture provides a flexible personalization environment to easily modify language tables, reports and forms, whereby any language can be supported, including double byte languages. System upgrades do not affect translation, as all translations remain intact and fully operational with no maintenance from release to release. Multilingual capability extends to the user level, not just the client. The same client workstation and log-on can be used by more than one employee with more than one language. For example, one employee can be working in Spanish while another employee on the same or a different workstation is using English.

The Financial Analyst module, which has been OEM-ed by the financial reporting expert provider, Timeline, provides report templates, multiple consolidation company structures, subsidiary data imports, inter-company reconciliation report and eliminations, adjustment entry, and consolidation rule maintenance. Comprehensive budgeting capabilities such as multilevel budgeting, consolidations, allocations, and performance reporting are also available.

Intuitive has long made a conscious decision not to target a direct presence in many foreign markets, and to go for product distribution mainly through partners and value added resellers (VARs). This has often proven to be advantageous to the SME's for keeping costs down, and, as selling through partners requires a higher quality of product support, and accompanying documentation. By deliberately steering clear of too ambitious expansionist policies that have hindered so many smaller software companies in the past, and by focusing on a handful of core markets, Intuitive has managed to keep itself on healthy track. Also, direct and indirect channel that have already been built in targeted countries has helped the company with product translation and localization issues, which has resulted with the above-mentioned solid multinational and localization capabilities of the product. As a good example, the company has already developed a strong market presence in the emerging China markets. Historically, the Intuitive international channel has represented just over 20 percent of sales revenue, which should likely increase in the future.

RMA, Shipping, and Other Vital Systems

Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, announced its ten-year anniversary. Namely, in 1994, the founders of the other ERP vendor PRO:MAN sold all interest in the company and started a new one, forming Intuitive. Since then, Intuitive has been offering enterprise software for small and midsize discrete manufacturers around the world with the flagship product, Intuitive ERP, which was designed from the ground up with 100 percent pure Microsoft technology and with well-established manufacturing practices in mind. The relative young age of the company has provided an organization and a development environment free from the burdens of supporting unwieldy sets of legacy systems and technologies; however, the company is founded on a solid foundation of many of its staff's thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems. This continues a discussion of the market impact.

Further, the return material authorization (RMA) module applies the same level of quality management to returned items as is applied to production inventory, since inspection is required for all returned materials. The process allows users to dispose of the returned materials as scrap if they cannot be used, return them to inventory if they are still good, or open a rework order if they can be reworked. There is also the tracking functionality within the module, from assigning an RMA number for the customer, disposing with the samples (optional), receiving the returned materials, and disposing with all returns, while credit memos and replacement orders can be automatically generated if desired.

Delivering finished goods, packing slips, internal bills of lading (BOL), pro-forma and commercial invoices, and serial number tracking (among other features) are included as part of the shipping process. Tools to cancel, add, or reverse shipping transactions give users even more control over their shipping processes, which generate finished goods pick-lists based on user-supplied selection criteria. This operation can also automatically check the customer's credit status and the item availability before generating shipping pick lists. Logically, a report is generated that lists the inventory items that need to be pulled from stores, while shipments against sales order deliveries, inventory levels, and costing information are updated in real time.

As gleaned from its depiction so far, the Intuitive ERP system is aimed at the smaller discrete make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO)/assemble-to-order (ATO), and mixed-mode manufacturers with deal sizes averaging thirty users but moving toward the forty- to fifty-seat range lately. This brings us to the product's customer resource management (CRM) capabilities, which have been natively strong in terms of service and repair and of sales configuration. The capabilities for relationship management and opportunity management have traditionally been provided by original equipment manufactured (OEM) Best Software's SalesLogix suite, but the current .NET rewrite has also been leveraged towards writing these native CRM capabilities. Intuitive has consequently been selling its own CRM modules for about eighteen months now, and the 7.0 release includes a completely re-written CRM in a .NET managed code.

Introduced at the end of 2001 as an optional module, a web-based Advanced Configurator is aimed at streamlining the quotation and ordering of configure-to-order (CTO) products to deliver, on-the-fly, accurate pricing, product configuration and specifications, as well as BOM and process routings. It is a "bottom-up," rules-based configurator, providing point-and-click product definition under a rule and constraint-based guidance engine. It can be executed from any Web browser and allows the user to execute product configuration concurrently or independently in either client/server or "thin web client" environments—all utilizing one universal set of product configuration rules and objects.

The Advanced Configurator is fully integrated with the sales, inventory, costing and quoting modules of the Intuitive ERP system, thereby enabling both the user's sales force and customers to configure customized products, view design and pricing changes automatically as configuration modifications are made, thereby simplifying the collection and management of critical product data for sales and order entry functions.

Summary and User Recommendations

Human capital management (HCM) is a holistic business strategy that should make every employee a competitive asset to deliver better operating and financial results. In other words, the lessons learned from managing trading partners (suppliers and customers) should be likewise applied to better managing employees. The bottom line on EIM systems (being closely related to HCM) is that their potential should not be ignored, since this software category promises to generate a fairly rapid and tangible return on investment (ROI), outline expensive over- and under-payment errors, and reduce administration overheads. It also provides business managers with the ability to plan ahead and align sales objectives with business goals. With sales being indisputably the lifeblood of virtually any company, selling should without a doubt be a more accurately accountable process forming the basis of a company's overall strategic objectives.

For the sales and marketing, field service, accounting, information technology (IT), and human resources (HR) departments to become more strategic within any organization, companies should investigate deploying EIM tools in order to free all managers from time-consuming, yet tactical, record-keeping functions. They should ensure that all stakeholders are committed, since the realization of EIM benefits depends on IT departments implementing the appropriate infrastructure; HR, sales, and finances need to communicate the goals of their programs and reengineering the processes for improved output; and employees and managers must change their approach to the way they conduct administration.

To be successful, vendors must provide strategic HCM solutions that deliver integrated compensation and performance management with readily available knowledge and coaching for both employees and managers. In summary, strategic HCM solutions (including EIM) should allow organizations to cascade goals and objectives from the corporate level through to managers and individual employees. The ultimate winners will be the enterprises that understand the connection between people and corporate performance, that know how to manage changes within the organization, and that have applied processes and systems to connect their employees to corporate strategic initiatives.

Still, given that there are "different strokes for different folks," the question is how much EIM does any given enterprise truly need, and in what shape and form. Maybe some companies can get by with simpler payment methods, whereby merit bonus plans are preferable to commissions, because they are easier to administer, and because they keep cost-of-sales and cost-of-labor in check. Profit sharing ties payout to corporate results like growth in revenue or profit, whereby several percent of base salary can be allocated for additional payout purposes—but it might fail if participants view the program as an entitlement (which yields modest satisfaction for payouts in good years and significant dissatisfaction for no payouts in bad years). Conversely, sales compensation plans (commissions) tie performance measures to individual or sales teams' efforts, as these plans provide a base salary plus an at-risk component that is paid based on the person's ability to reach a predefined goal. Other similar add-on programs reward employees with a specified dollar amount or a percentage (often between 5 and 10 percent) of base salary for achieving pre-established goals. While effective, too many duplicate plans, excessive payments, inappropriate goals, and inconsistent eligibility criteria can weaken their value.

To help minimize compensation overhauls, managers should keep performance measures down to only a few key metrics, and they should be easy for employees to understand. To establish the most appropriate metrics, compensation experts should interview senior management to determine future sales objectives; they should talk to corporate-level staff to learn what is currently working and what areas need improvement; and they should consult with field sales management and sales personnel for their understanding of the existing program and their suggestions for improvement. After gaining input from the appropriate employees, the user enterprise has to create new sales metrics that are in line with both corporate goals and sales professionals' aspirations. The sales metrics should be challenging yet achievable goals (beyond merely standard) that at least half of the sales force should be able to achieve (although meeting mere standard should not be rewarded), and that an additional fraction (10 percent to 15 percent) of the sales force should exceed.

EIM for High Tech, Telecommunications, and Life Sciences

The anticipated 25 percent growth in the high tech industry is supported by the implementation of EIM solutions in many companies, due to complex distribution structures and compensation plans, and growing sales forces. Thin profit margins, tough price competition, short product life cycles, and the need to optimize inventory require manufacturing companies to keep a close watch on ever-changing sales strategies and compensation expenses. In addition, frequent new-product deliveries and introductions create the need for fast-changing, short-term sales incentives, whereby the challenge is to carefully manage discount practices. The appropriate EIM solution has to take the guesswork out of launching compensation programs by allowing managers to model new plans before rollout, while sales and compensation staff should be able to see at a glance how well sales strategies are working via alerting and portal applications. The solution also has to be able to associate incentive pay to specific discount practices, product mix, or other profitability measures to help maximize sales performance.

A projection of 11 percent growth in the telecommunications industry is resulting from increased sales forces, retail outlets, and a variety of tariff plans complicating incentive payment management. As telecommunications companies have increased the number of products and services they offer to the market, competition has intensified, resulting in lower prices for the consumer. Given these declining prices for products and services, telecommunications companies must increase their total number of customers to drive revenue and profit growth. The value of each customer has risen, indicating that customer retention (reduced customer churn) is imperative. Sales teams and retail outlets are compensated not only for signing up new customers, but for signing customers who keep their services activated for at least six months or longer. In addition, sales representatives and distributors are rewarded for up-selling and cross-selling additional products and services to customers. Other notable business challenges include improving customer service capabilities to bolster customer satisfaction, developing new products and services and business models to protect against competitive threat from new technologies (such as voice over Internet protocol [VoIP]), and implementing strategic partnership models to expand distribution capabilities

An EIM solution for telecommunication should thus provide the flexibility such companies require to keep compensation plans in line with continually changing, competitive market conditions. Using the process model, telecommunications providers must be able to quickly and easily implement compensation plans with multiple performance measures to address business issues such as customer retention and product mix. Stepping-stair matrices can be used to reward sales teams for selling product bundles, where each additional product included results in a higher commission rate. The alerting and reporting applications should enable providers to share performance and compensation payment data with sales teams and retailers, securely and frequently via the web, thereby motivating the sales force and distribution channels to reduce service deactivations, and to up-sell additional products and services.

Last but not least are the life sciences industries, with great EIM growth projections of about 30 percent. Life sciences sales representatives are offering more products to their sales targets, but are spending less time with each physician. Sales representatives must continually sharpen their go-to-market strategies and product pitches to stay ahead of the competition, whereas sales teams have to deepen their knowledge of each medication or medical device, while learning how to communicate the benefits more crisply. In the future, life sciences companies may better use longitudinal data, such as patient demographics, in addition to traditional EIM data when devising sales and marketing plans. Incentive compensation programs are critical to the sales efforts in this industry, since rewards and contests are commonly used to supercharge a new product introduction and to drive competitive wins and market share gains. Territory management is vital to ensure the proper coverage models for categories of medications and groupings of physicians. Often, as many as seven different sales representatives from one company call on the same doctor, which makes managing territorial splits and account reassignments crucial. Another business challenge stems from the need to maintain an auditable record of drug sales to comply with government regulations.

With detailed visibility into business activities and sales performance, an EIM package should allow life sciences companies to create and implement compensation plans that meet their unique corporate goals. Sales and compensation staff should thereby also be able to drill down into performance for specific plans and sales sectors, customizing and refining strategies for precise target markets, while an automated rule-based system should allow compensation staff to easily manage programs for many product lines across complex territories, meeting the demands of fluid sales structures.

Surado CRM Enhancements To Come

A recent upgrade is Surado's "Pick-list Preference," which further enhances the usability of the software by making screens and selections role-based. Relevant or preferred information will be displayed based on the role of the user logged in. This can be configured and customized as needed.

Surado CRM 5.1 provides functionality for power users and enterprise system administrators who need the capability to create sophisticated custom screen and work flows with "programming" level control. The areas of custom screens, integrated work flow, and automated business rules have gone through a major overhaul compared to Surado 5.0, with over 100 new functions. Users will now be able to consolidate other stand-alone applications developed in Microsoft Access or other databases to be fully integrated as part of the Surado CRM system. Functionality includes the ability to create unlimited custom screens, calling procedures to extend the functionality within the custom screen area, and to extend the integration functionality with other back office applications. All of these features also come with security features at the individual, role or group, and application functional levels, as required by any robust enterprise application.

Other upgrades which can be expected in the 5.1 release are extensive project management functionality, where users will be able to handle not only short-term projects, but also long-term projects. In addition, there will be a "manager interface" to help keep track of resource allocation.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, in the small business arena, there is a lot of discussion going on with respect to hosted solutions. When asked about the current buzz about small businesses being won over by hosted solutions such as Salesforce.com, Surado mentioned that web accessibility and features have been enhanced. However, Surado CRM 5.0 is primarily an on-premise solution. For small companies who are unwilling to deal with the overhead of maintaining any form of IT infrastructure, Surado would not be a good fit.. Such companies would also need to deal with the risks of having their data hosted on a system that may not be easily accessible once the service contact is over.

User Recommendations

SMBs seeking CRM solutions should consider adding Surado 5.0 to their list of applications for evaluation for its ease of use (which may lead to a quicker and higher adoption rate, a key factor in any successful implementation). Its feature-rich quality and comparatively lower cost allows Surado 5.0 to have higher value per functionality. However, companies considering Surado should also keep in mind that it is not compatible with key platforms such as IBM Mainframe and Unix, and may not be able to meet the requirements for database systems such as IBM DB2, MySQL, or Oracle. Additionally, organizations with more than 2,500 users should consider other options such as Siebel or SAP, as Surado does not support such large organizations. Because Surado does not have a hosted option available, companies considering a fully hosted solution should also consider solutions such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

A Customer Relationship Management Solution Aims To Cover all the Bases

Contact and Account Management
This area of CRM typically displays and manages detailed account information, such as information related to the company, contacts within the company review of past activities and history, scheduling, and task management.

This module offers a unified interface for account and contact management functionality, where users can review past communications, upcoming activities, sales opportunities, quotes and purchases, support issues, links to relevant documents, and information from back-end systems. In addition, Surado CRM also captures all customer communications, whether through phone, e-mail, fax, the Internet, or personal contacts. A fully integrated workgroup scheduling and task management features the ability to track activities, participants, and resources, including pop-up reminders. A relationships tab also allows users to track the important relationships that may exist between two or more contacts in the system that otherwise might otherwise be overlooked or poorly managed.

Sales Management
This area of a CRM solution focuses on managing sales opportunities and processes. It provides the features and functionality to define, implement, manage, and execute one or more sales cycles, based on individual opportunity types. This allows users of Surado CRM to configure the system to better fit their unique needs rather than having to conform to a generic sales cycle supplied by the system.

The module includes the basics: contact information, correspondence, opportunity and forecasting data, literature and presentations, quotes, orders, and post-sale service history.

Surado CRM 5.0 allows for multi-source data import from lists, or captured leads from a web site through its eLeads module. It also allows inquiry tracking and intelligent leads routing. Automated process can be initiated to distribute literature, schedule follow-up activities, and set conditions to advance opportunities. Managers can use Surado CRM to monitor team activities across customized sales stages across multiple product pipelines. Sales positioning features and functionalities are also available through competitive intelligence analysis and customer analytics, to identify habits, trends, and potential.

Marketing Management
In this area of CRM, the key components to attracting and retaining a customer base are evaluation, design, implementation, and execution of marketing initiatives.

The application can track the results of advertisements, direct mail, and telemarketing, and help design, execute, and manage personalized, permission-based campaigns. Surado CRM 5.0 also allows for the planning, design, execution, and management of multichannel permission-based marketing campaigns. Users can assign tasks and responsibilities according to revenue projections, campaign periods, targeted audiences, and channels. Potential deployment issues can be identified, and resources re-allocated. E-mail and fax campaigns can be set up for automated execution and follow-up.

Surado CRM provides for campaign return on investment (ROI) analysis as a means to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, by comparing potential and actual responses and sales

Can Your Product Development Move Closer to Consumers Now?

Although Virtual Customer Viewpoint (VCV) (name of First Insight’s solution) mainly targets retailers in helping them “know better which products are going to be popular with consumers before they make their purchasing decisions”, I feel that there’s a possibility to use this approach in product development for manufacturers as well. Here are two cases:

1) Manufacturers use social media channels to capture customers/consumers’ opinions and ideas directly.

2) By building connections between manufacturers and retailers, consumers’ voices captured by retailers can be routed (or even sold in some cases) to manufacturers.

While noticing the opportunity for manufacturers to get closer to consumers through social media channels, I also realized that it might be more difficult for manufacturers to do so than retailers.

Firstly, there is more information to be exchanged between manufacturers and customers than between retailers and consumers. Retailers mainly care about which products to carry. Manufacturers, on the other hand, want to know more details about customer opinions toward product design. Textual communication with consumer communities may suffice the purposes for retailers to capture consumer preference but for manufacturers, communications need to be conducted in a richer and a more immersible way. No doubt, three-dimensional (3D) product models is an ideal vehicle for better communication but it requires the capability of accessing and modifying 3D content on the consumer side. As I discussed in the blog post mentioned above, I’m hoping for the democratization of 3D visibility, and I know that there are vendors working on making 3D more approachable.

Secondly, compared with retailers, it is probably more difficult for manufactures to react according to consumer opinions. When a prominent voice from the crowd is heard, retailers may adjust their buying, pricing, or promotion decisions promptly. But for manufacturers, product changes may not be as flexible due to limitations on the availability of technology, manufacturing facilities, sourcing capabilities, and such. One thing I can think of in order to relieve the pain in product changes is to listen to customers as early as possible—if a change is determined and initiated earlier, the cost required to implement the change is lower.

Lastly, how can a manufacturer protect its product’s intellectual property (IP) while maximizing the communication with a wide range of product stakeholders as early as possible? Usually, the question “what do you think about the product (or idea) that I’m presenting to you?” receives more valuable feedback from customers than a question like “what product do you think I should develop?” While the former is more effective in gathering customer opinions, it also asks for more efforts in protecting your IP