CRM

                                             CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

          There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative: people, process, and technology.

• The people throughout a company-from the CEO to each and every customer service rep-need to buy in to and support CRM.
•  A company's business processes must be reengineered to bolster its CRM initiative, often from the view of, How can this process better serve the customer?
• Firms must select the right technology to drive these improved processes, provide the best data to the employees, and be easy enough to operate that users won't balk.

 If one of these three foundations is not sound, the entire CRM structure will crumble.

      It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

      CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behaviour and value of customers. This insight allows for improved customer service, increased call centre efficiency, added cross-sell and up sell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

         For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must convince its staff that change is good and that CRM will benefit them. Then it must analyze its business processes to decide which need to be reengineered and how best to go about it. Next is to decide what kind of customer information is relevant and how it will be used. Finally, a team of carefully selected executives must choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated. This process, depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more. And although some firms are using Web-based CRM technologies for only hundreds of dollars per month per user, large companies may spends millions to purchase, install, and customize the technology required to support its CRM initiative.

Using CRM, a business can:

• ·         Provide better customer service
• ·         Increase customer revenues
• ·         Discover new customers
• ·         Cross sell/Up Sell products more effectively
• ·         Help sales staff close deals faster
• ·         Make call centers more efficient
• ·         Simplify marketing and sales processes

The advantages can be summarized according to the Feature

Marketing

• ·         Make intelligent business decisions with enhanced customer insights
• ·         Increase marketing velocity and speed to market
• ·         Maximize visibility into and control of your entire marketing process
• ·         Drive customer demand
• ·         Increase returns on your marketing investments

Sales

• ·         Grow profitable relationships
• ·         Maintain focus on productive activity
• ·         Eliminate barriers to productivity
• ·         Improve sales efficiency Service
• ·         Transform service into a profitable line of business
• ·         Increase customer loyalty
• ·         Drive revenue
• ·         Reduce costs of customer service and field service
• ·         Decrease service giveaways

Web channel enablement

• ·         Drive revenue and extend market reach
• ·         Increase customer convenience and satisfaction
• ·         Reduce the cost of sales and support
• ·         Build lasting customer loyalty
• ·         Improve sales and service profitability

Running an interaction center

• ·         Increase customer satisfaction
• ·         Improve credibility with your customers
• ·         Increase revenue and productivity
• ·         Manage the customer interaction life cycle

Partner channel management

• ·         Boost revenue through channel collaboration
• ·         Reduce indirect channel support costs
• ·         Increase partner satisfaction and ease of doing business
• ·         Maximize value to your customers by enabling your partners

       Microsoft Dynamic CRM:

           http://crm.dynamics.com/demos/salesautomation/default.html

Reference: 

1. http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/What-Is-CRM-46033.aspx

2. http://crmtutorial.com/Customer-Relationship-Management-(CRM)-Tutorial/a42p1

RFD_bid_for_procurement_solution

Redesigning a process

PROCUREMENT:

Procurement is more than the steps that are used in the acquisition of goods and services.

E-Procurement makes sure that product should be in right price, good quality and in proper quantity. It need the product should be delivered in the right time from the source.

CURRENT STATE:

In the current state the stationery are stored in the storage. The company will check for the availability of the stationery for employers. If they have enough stationery they will be transported from the storage to the employees and it has to be distributed to the employees. Suppose there is not enough stationery in the storage they have to make an order for the new stationery. If the goods are received in time they need to be distributed to the employees else they need to wait for the stationery. The remaining stationeries are transported back to the storage.

RE-DESIGN STATE: 

           In the new state the stationeries are stored and database is developed for the storage. The inspection is made to check for the availability of the stationery. The check for employee needs is done by the company. If the company has enough stationery with them they will transport the stationery to the employees. Instead if they don’t have enough stationery with them, they will search for the better product for the employees and make order for them. If the goods reached in time they will be transported for the employees. If else there will be a delay in goods. So company make arrangement for make the goods to deliver in time. These new goods will be updated in the storage database. Finally these goods will be distributed to the employees and get feedback from the employees. The remaining stationeries will be transported back to the storage  

Tesco develops a buy-side e-commerce system for supply chain management

1)  What benefits does Tesco’s information exchange offer to the retailer and its supplies?

1. Tesco's information exchange server offers a sophiscated two-way collaboration in its supply chain.
2. It shifts the responsibility of managing products down to the relevant supplier because they have access to almost real time data of Tesco's products from the stores or depots.
3. It ensures products availability, reduces Tesco's inventory cost and also the suppliers inventory cost.
4. It makes understanding of specific products between Tesco and its suppliers easier.

2)  What differences have the use of TIE added over the original EDI system?

1. The Tie system provides real time products information to see how sales perform by distribution centre, by individual store or even by TV region- important for promotions.
2. The Tie system also facilitated a two-way collaboration in Tesco's supply chain unlike the EDI. The EDI only forecasts demands of products and messages of actual store demand or depot are sent to the relevant supplier.

3)  Discuss reasons why only two of Tesco’s suppliers have fundamentally altered the way they work as a TIE.

1.      The suppliers will be providing products to other retailers who may not be using a TIE exchange system as Tesco has. So the suppliers have to keep using the same work line to satisfy all their retails.

2.      Retailing is one of the traditional industries, where each of the supplier must follow their own work line that suits the needs for the majority of the retailers.

Who manages the supply chain?

Advert 1: Supply chain manager- The Healthcare Company

Responsible for: provide strategic and tactical leader-ship to the UK operation, reinforcing customer service and delivering supply chain profitability; instrumental in developing and implementing supply chain; be the ambassador of customer service and supply chain.

Skills: outstanding communication and influencing skills; combined with excellent analytical skills.

Experience: a thorough working knowledge of IT business management tools.

Advert 2: Supply chain manager- The Manufacturing Company

Responsible for: the design and implementation of information flows; manage trade-off between production efficiency, inventory and customer service; analysis of data to ensure that valid business decisions; management of service level agreements to maximize service whilst minimizing inventory; championing the use of IT planning systems; the development of team members to ensure standards are set and achieved.

Skills: analytical and problem-solving skills; strong system knowledge in planning and inventory control preferably in a short lead-time environment; highly motivated with strong influencing and communication skills.

Experience: been educated to a high standard, ideally with a relevant degree; strong system experience in planning and inventory control preferably in a short lead-time environment.

Advert 3: Logistics manager- The Engineering Company

Responsible for: the business, coordinating activities between operations and function; measured by the achievement of positive change in continuous improvement environment; involve direct control of distribution and third parties.

Skills: outstanding communication and high influencing skills.

Experience: graduate caliber from a background involving commercial and budget responsibility, customer-focused with character, drive and energy.

Advert 4: Transport manager- The Food Manufacturer

Responsible for: efficient distribution operation

Skills: analytical and planning

Experience: extensive transport and management

The supply and seller side of eBay market

Background of the Company

      E-bay is a site that commenced trading on Monday, 4 September 1995 with name 'Auction Web'. The site attracted no visitors at all in its first 24 hours.It was later re-branded eBay in 1997 and since then it has enjoyed a surge in visitors of about 890 million page views per day in 2004 and 7.7 gigabyte of outbound data traffic per second.

     At the end of 2005 its visitors surged up to 157 million. eBay consist of three major businesses as its purpose is to 'pioneer new communities around the world built on commerce,sustained by trust and inspired by opportunity'.

1) The Market Place- This is the heart of the business that intends to 'create the world's marketplace'. This is where the functionality, safety, ease-of-use and reliability of the platform are controlled.

2) Pay Pal- This is a company that was acquired in 2003 and its aim is to 'create the new global standard for online payments'.

3) Skype- This is a company that was acquired in 2005 and it provides telecommunication services to users worldwide via voice over internet protocol (VOIP).

eBays business model was originally intended to provide an avenue for consumers to sell goods to one another (consumer-consumer) but it has recently introduced an option for paying for an item at a fixed price (Buy-It-Now).

Finally,eBay's marketplace growth was achieved by delivering specific sites localized for different geographies such as Australia, Spain, United kingdom and USA.

      ebay is a buy and sell website. In ebay we can purchase a thing only while looking at its picture. But 

actually we dont know weather it is that thing what we want.So there is always some kind of 

hesitancy in our mind while purchasing a thing from ebay whether this thing will work properly, 

will it gives me the full value of money?        

     very one wants to buy a thing of their choice have a look on them in original, not from a 

picture.The pictures on ebay are not so clear so sometimes users prefers not to buy that thing 

even he might like the attributes.we check the thing on ebay after purchasing it, we cant check 

them before buying it. If it does not work then it will make our money lose.when a customer 

wants to buy a thing on ebay he looks on its picture, but there many pictures of items which 

are not so clear. So ebay have to work more on increasing the quality of the images. 

ebay are taking a lot more time in delivering items to the customer, even sometimes a week, 

they must reduce this time period.  

THE MAP OF EBAY

 

Advantages

eBay has very huge marketplace, they sale online which have no physical location limit. They can sale many different types product, and get million people order for goods on each day. Also anyone can be a seller by using eBay, it attract more and more sellers to sell their product. Thirdly, people can buy anything anytime, even can buy products from other countries without higher prices. Moreover, there have no time limit, people can buy and sell on eBay 24 hours every day. Another advantage is buyers gain products by auction on eBay, they will feel contented. Some of them will like this kind of specific auction, because it has challenge to make people back for more satisfaction.