Managing Automation - December 2007 - (Page 47) ny’s 47 plants and warehouses worldwide. The company also uses SAP’s Business Warehouse tool. The plan, Reeves says, was to integrate data from the company’s CRM and other systems in the Business Warehouse. Dow Corning officials soon realized that, with CRM and ERP running on the same enterprise backbone, they had a chance to expand CRM’s scope by more tightly linking sales processes with other enterprise processes. “We have a robust integrated back end to plug into and a globally integrated supply chain that we can see into and understand,” Reeves says. “We saw an opportunity to facilitate a lot of crossfunctional team collaboration. That’s a big part of what set this off.” Reeves’ group began interviewing salespeople and sales managers to determine what information and processes they needed to do their jobs better. They began to put together a series of workflows and reports that pull data from a total of 17 Dow Corning back-end systems to support the sales staff. Using the Exchange Infrastructure piece of SAP’s NetWeaver, Reeves’ team pulled data from financial, order management, product information, and other modules, giving sales employees access to territory performance, sales margin, open order, and days sales outstanding reports. They also created workflows that pull together data in support of specific, common sales activities. One, for example, prepares salespeople for customer calls by providing access to a variety of order history and other customer-specific data. Another pulls data from inventory, order management, and other systems to help salespeople manage product samples. SHARING PRODUCT IDEAS Dow Corning has even begun to integrate CRM with the company’s engineering group by giving salespeople tools for collaborating on new product ideas. When a salesperson receives a customer request that has the potential to lead to a new product opportunity for Dow Corning, he or she can click on a button that brings up an Outlook or Web form. After the salesperson enters the customer information and new product idea, the information is routed to the correct individuals in engineering for their review and collaboration. Salespeople access these new reports and workflows through personalized portals that Reeves’ team built using SAP’s Enterprise Portal tool. After logging in using a common single sign-on screen, sales managers see reports, tasks, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for which they are responsible. Dow Corning has also added access to the new reports and workflows from mobile Blackberry PDA devices. Over the next 12 to 18 months, Dow Corning plans to use the portal-based user interROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT face and new tools to begin to A look at CRM implementation failure rates simplify some processes, such as how the company gets sales By year: lead information quickly to dis18% 2005 tribution partners, Reeves says. Perhaps not surprisingly, 31% 2006 soon after Dow Corning rolled out the new portal-based CRM 29% 2007 tools, utilization by the compa0% 10% 20% 30% 40% ny’s sales organization dropped. That happened, Reeves says, beBy type of company: cause some users resisted changing to the new system, 43% Process and, in some cases, there were system response time problems. 13% Discrete Those problems have been fixed, and users have become 29% Service more familiar with the system, 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% Reeves says. Within three to four months after deployment, By size of company: he says, utilization returned to normal and is now higher than Less than $1 billion 26% in revenue it was with the old system. $1 billion and Dow Corning hasn’t yet at33% above tempted to measure the ROI 0% 10% 20% 30% from the new CRM system in Source: AMR Research terms of improved sales or sales effectiveness. That will happen beginning in the middle of next year. In the long run, Reeves says, the kind of integration and cross-functional collaboration that have driven Dow Corning’s reframing of CRM will change the way companies like Dow Corning think about the role of sales in the organization. “It will start to change the game,” Reeves says. “It will cause companies to rethink how their selling efforts need managingautomation.com to be supported by other functions, such as engineering and RELATED ARTICLES: supply chain.” The Great Migration from Legacy Systems (The Great Migration) In the meantime, Reeves says www.managingautomation.com/migration he hopes CRM software vendors E-Commerce: Taming the Beast will break out of their tight fowww.managingautomation.com/ecommerce cus on sales force automation Dreaming of One ERP and begin to deliver some of the www.managingautomation.com/oneERP integrated workflows and crossSAP Enhances NetWeaver BPM functional capabilities that Dow Capabilities Corning has built for itself. www.managingautomation.com/bpm “We’re hoping we’ll see more of that play out over the next COMPANIES MENTIONED: couple of years as other comSAP www.managingautomation.com/SAP3 panies want to do similar things,” Reeves says. ■ C Reportard maonline 47 December 2007 http://managingautomation.com http://www.managingautomation.com/migration http://www.managingautomation.com/ecommerce http://www.managingautomation.com/oneERP http://www.managingautomation.com/bpm http://www.managingautomation.com/SAP3
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