Managing Automation - December 2007 - (Page 46) [DECEMBER 2007] Transformation Integration TechWatch Industries [ TRANSFORMATION ] Reformulating CRM’s VALUE BY JEFF MOAD Dissatisfied with a sales force automation-centric view of CRM, Dow Corning has invested in building a new collection of portal-based applications that pull data from and promote collaboration across the enterprise. ince the mid-1990s, specialty chemicals manufacturer Dow Corning Corp., like many manufacturers, has been struggling to realize a return on its investment in customer relationship management (CRM) software. While the company’s CRM deployment had been fairly effective at supporting sales force automation activities, such as contact management and lead tracking, its customer management requirements had grown well beyond that. With an increasingly global customer base, a complex and highly customized product to sell, and a multi-tier channel to support, Dow Corning needed CRM to be tightly integrated with other enterprise systems and to support a wide range of customer-support processes. “We started to question whether you can get any ROI out of CRM as strictly a sales force automation exercise,” says Chip Reeves, director of marketing and sales processes at Dow Corning. So, just over a year ago, the company decided to reframe its CRM initiative, turning customer relationship management at Dow Corning from something that was narrowly sales force automation-focused and isolated into a set of processes that are more integrated with the rest of the enterprise and more broadly aimed at helping salespeople and sales management do things like prepare to call on customers, get access to pricing and product documentation, manage samples, and even brainstorm with customers and engineers on the company’s next new products. “We are reframing CRM in a way that exposes a lot more information to the selling function, starting with sales management,” Reeves says. Dow Corning certainly isn’t the only manufacturing company that has had mixed feelings about its CRM efforts to date. Many companies have invested in CRM software only to discover that, because the functionality doesn’t match the user requirements, utilization suffers. As a result, CRM at many organizations — particularly process manufacturers — is often deemed a failure (see chart, p. 47). Dow Corning’s push to refashion CRM started in September 2006, when the company decided to replace its Siebel 7.5.3 CRM applications with SAP’s enterprise CRM package. Behind the switch was Dow Corning’s desire to more easily integrate CRM data with data from order management, engineering, and other functions. The company has deployed SAP’s applications as its ERP backbone, deployed as a single instance serving the compa- ma December 46 2007 Photo: Photodisc
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