It’s not just the agent at the
field level or team leader who benefits from flexibility and ease of
cross-enterprise integration in the software developed by CRM
and Customer Service and Support (CS&S) vendors. Executives require
data to perform well, and software that locks the enterprise into
certain ways of operating also lock the enterprise out of
up-to-the-minute analysis and report capability.
With today’s great emphasis on analysis of corporate data, and current enterprise planning to leverage existing CRM technology (over the next five years, organizations will be looking to capitalize on the investments they’ve already made in CRM),
executives are now calling for greater integration and customization.
One of the more complex areas to do this is in the supply chain of the
enterprise, especially as a result of the great percentage of the
process nowadays given to outsourcing.
It has never been simple to manage the information
that flows through a product supply chain. Companies must work closely
with suppliers, logistics providers, distributors and retailers to
collect and manage information about customer demand, sales orders,
distribution schedules, production planning, manufacturing, sourcing
and product design…But this task has become even more complex because
outsourcing has stretched supply chains around the globe.
...executives have given up something valuable: easy
access to critical data—such as details about quality, supplies on hand
and manufacturing capacity—that could help raise productivity. – McKinsey & Company – Understanding supply chain risk
McKinsey gives the example of a computer
hardware company’s supply planner, trying to meet a spike in demand for
certain products, and needing capacity and inventory information from
several components suppliers and several contract manufacturers.
However, at the time of most critical need for information, the data
may be locked up in the IT systems or spreadsheets of a dozen or more
companies.
Similarly, they add, a manufacturer seeking to
reduce warranty costs may want to connect data at the far ends of its
supply chain, from field service technicians making repairs to
components suppliers trying to keep their costs low. McKinsey points
out that “reconnecting the dots isn’t easy, given the widening range of
players in the supply chain and their divergent interests and
incentives”.
Our own case studies at Dovetail Software, in
the world of Andocs Clarify™ systems and databases, reflect this same
critical need for enterprise-wide integration.
One of our
customers produces machinery used in manufacturing, and deployed
throughout the world. The customer was using the Clarify ClearSupport
module to handle service calls and manage their staff of Field Service
Engineers who install, maintain, and repair this machinery. They used
ClearLogistics to track their inventory of spare parts across inventory
locations around the world. This operation embraced thousands of
machines and spanned a dozen countries.
As modern
management became more time-critical and complex, and pressures
increased systemically, our customer was running into Clarify
fat-client limitations. They determined that the application was slow
and difficult to use over long distances, such as between North America
and their branches in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan: users there experienced
frequent loss of connection.
Our customer’s predicament
was that their non-US offices couldn’t use locally purchased machines
to run the Clarify fat client, because the foreign operating system was
causing data corruption. The only solution before the Dovetail,
web-based thin client was to install and configure US machines and ship
them to the Asian offices.
The simple answer was deploying Dovetail CRM
thin client, and being web-based this immediately cured the problem of
remote access to centralized data. This was only the beginning,
however. The company discovered, during this whole process of
painlessly enhancing the reach and utility of their Clarify database,
that they had a development path again. Using Dovetail Web Services
on the .NET platform, the customer went on to integrate other,
non-Clarify logistics applications to add to their ability to provide
field engineering support.
