CRM - November 2007 - (Page 39)

WORKFLOW AUTOMATION vendor. “With automation, a company can implement more strategic and complex compensation plans; modify them quickly to meet new opportunities; and more easily analyze their effectiveness for continuous process improvement.” Compensation plans start with the creation of business rules that will correctly calculate credits, commissions, and bonuses. “In an automated workflow, these rules take effect automatically, removing any doubt of inaccuracy and fostering trust between sales and finance,” Steele says. “This is in sharp contrast to spreadsheet-based compensation management, where spreadsheets have been proven in recent studies to result in as much as a 10 percent error rate.” Paychecks being as important as they are, automation clearly doesn’t suffer as much pushback here. Automated workflow is an absolute must when mobility is involved, since the remote user doesn’t have access to the same resources an office-based worker has. Mobility applications improve business processes by automating what would otherwise be tedious or difficult on the road. ICI Paints, a NetSuite customer using Antenna Software’s AMPower mobile sales solution, illustrates the benefits: In going mobile, ICI eliminated manual and paper-based processes; simplified the quotation process by giving sales reps the ability to provide real-time quotes and estimates; and enabled sales reps to place orders in real time while with their customers. The greater sales visibility and the productivity rise of 30 percent didn’t hurt, either. Unfortunately, Straus says, there really is no top-to-bottom system to manage what is perhaps a company’s most precious commodity: the decisions it makes. And any such system would really need to be built from the bottom up, anyway: The most important and timely decisions are made at the functional levels of the business, and higher-level actions are based on their results. Straus has a personal anecdote of his own: Several years ago, his bank instituted programs intended to increase its wallet share with customers. Straus says now that he was doing a lot of traveling at the time, and could have benefited from automated billpayment services. “Somewhere along the line, I missed making a deposit to my account, which led to my being overdrawn for about $300 in overages,” he says. But when he went in to straighten out the issue, an overzealous bank rep “followed the corporate directive and tried to sell me overdraft insurance.” Straus explained his situation, but when the rep noticed in Straus’s customer file that he only had a checking account with the bank, the rep tried to upsell an interestbearing account. “I pointed out that I was a long-term loyal customer, who had never been overdrawn before, and his response was to try to sell me a credit card with overdraft insurance. The upshot of this is that I’m no longer a customer, and the reason is a lack of workflow and decisionmaking ability.” www.destinationCRM.com IT’S THE PROCESSES, STUPID Pyke suggests that the next step in workflow automation and BPM is “process-based technology that understands the needs of people and supports the inherent ‘spontaneity’ of the human mind.” He calls this Knowledge Intensive Business Process Management, or KIBPM. It’s putting the focus on the process (as Straus would), rather than on the work itself: “Of course the underlying objective of the process is still of vital importance. Indeed, it provides the underlying bedrock of getting tasks completed—but these processes are much more complex, ad hoc, enduring, and important to the business. They are contracted processes as opposed to coordinated or controlled processes as provided by Workflow and BPM solutions.” Using the BPM approach would be like hitting a hole-in-one every time you tee off, Pyke says: nice, but hardly realistic. “There’s a lot that happens between teeing off and finishing a hole. Normally about four steps (or shots)—but you have to deal with the unexpected: sand traps, water hazards, lost balls, free drops, collaboration with fellow players, unexpected consultation with the referee—and so it goes on. Then there are 17 more holes to do.” The result is an intricate and complex process with 18 targets but about 72 operations. Roth sees the move to knowledge-based workflow automation already occurring, at least with I-many. With more complex deals, there’s reporting at every stage to see what stage the contract is in, to identify bottlenecks and such. “Soon, we’ll support alternate variable language—sections with preapproved alterations from the standard contract—which can be swapped in and are indicated in reporting so the company knows what’s being used,” he says. The process moves based on what’s needed, not just what’s planned. “Just because you can automate something doesn’t necessarily mean you should.” Human involvement remains critical. “Worldwide, more and more routine work is gradually being automated and/or commoditized,” Pyke writes. “So the skilled human work left over is more important than ever—both to individuals, who are competing for a smaller and smaller number of interesting jobs, and to organizations, for whom skilled human work is becoming the only competitive differentiator left.” Skilled human work typically isn’t performed in a vacuum; it’s collaborative. Yet in Pyke’s view, our supposedly collaboration-friendly Internet communications are actually weakening collaboration by flooding us with documents and messages. Combined with poor management of the workforce, we’re left with a need to collaborate better. “This means adopting a simple, general approach to collaboration—one that meets both individual and organizational needs.” Those needs include dealing with the unexpected. “This is not just about using a set of tools to deal with every anticipated CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | NOVEMBER 2007 39 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - November 2007

CRM - November 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity Have You Caught It? The Mother of Enterprise Information Market Focus: Technology: The Simple Truth about Complex Manufacturing Q&A: Gianforte Talks CRM Required Reading Predicting Profitability Checking the Pulse of the Contact Center Cast a Narrow Net Modern Times, Modern Methods Primos Hunting Calls Snares Efficiency Nailing It Down Moving in on Mortgage Delinquencies RDS Delivery Delivers on Service Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - November 2007

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