Exercise 22

Exercise 22.
Differentiate between software systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, Business-to Business e-commerce programs and Supply-Chain Management (SCM) software.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system includes tools, technologies and procedures that allow managing, improving and facilitating sales, support and related interactions with customers, prospects, and business partners throughout the enterprise. The main goal of a CRM system is to help sales and marketing people to analyze of customer behavior and its value for the organization by using technology and human resources. Research already made in this area states that, using CRM systems, organizations may obtain loyal and more satisfied customers by improving their business, reducing acquisition costs and gaining acknowledgment of their brand, which it is translated to a better financial performance. Some organizations only implement some functionalities of a CRM system and, although this action may limit the whole system functionality, it is a great step towards integrating the missing modules in the future to achieve a complete implementation. (Iseing, 2007).

On the other hand, a Supply Chain Management (SCM) System is a packaged technological solution that, after its deployment, it offers to the organization several advantages to coordinate their raw material acquisition, production and logistic processes, and at the same time, it improves relationship with customer and suppliers, building longterm strategic alliances. We can define a SCM system as the technological solution that manages and give support to activities related with product delivery, from raw material management until the final product reaches the end customer. It includes processes for raw material acquisition, production and assembly, storage, inventory control, order management, distribution along commercial channels and customer delivery. A SCM system will allow the organization to automate and control in a better way processes related to product acquisition, production and warehousing in order to obtain the desired benefits. (Iseing, 2007).

CRM systems are usually projects whose application needs to be prepared to quickly respond to changes in the requirements, maybe one of the reasons being the dynamic and sometimes unstable environment of the commercial processes in the organizations. For example, most of the time the marketing department needs to adequate their processes to obtain new information about competitors, clients, new markets and market tendencies. On the other hand, in the SCM home grounds usually systems implementations require coordination of many members of the logistic chain, involving a large working team that needs a well-based and detailed plan to pursue the success of the overall SCM implementation process. Additionally, while SCM systems deal with information processing for operational transactional purposes, CRM systems concentrate more on information analysis for commercial decision support. (Iseing 2007).

Referances:
Iseing (2007). "IMPLEMENTATION APPROACHES FOR EXTENDED ENTERPRISESYSTEMS: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CRM AND SCM SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATIONAPPROACHES". Received 6th May, 2009 from URL - http://www.iseing.org/emcis/EMCIS2007/emcis07cd/EMCIS07-PDFs/704.pdf