(1888PressRelease)
October 18, 2006 - With up to 10 years of continued process improvements on the plant floor, and in back office and distribution operations, manufacturers have finally arrived at the front door of customer relationship management (CRM). Many senior manufacturing engineering and operations executives are strongly resistant and assert that lean CRM is the final frontier in the lean enterprise process. Now that the quick gains have been achieved from eliminating waste in the rest of the manufacturing enterprise, the areas most neglected—customer service, sales and marketing—are front and center.
Achieving bottom-line benefits from the implementation of many of the CRM technology solutions that provide “electronic” connections and profound data analysis and reporting capabilities is only part of the quality equation. There are systematic processes designed to achieve significant CRM benefits including:
• Planning and executing organizational and value-stream process improvements, particularly those issues affecting staff, culture and organizational issues
• Applying the principles of lean enterprise, total quality management and value-stream analysis to improve customer interface operations
• Justifying quality-coaching technologies, including self-organizing and autonomous agent-based solutions.
Larry Caretsky, president of Commence, developers of a stand alone industrial CRM solution, suggested that most enterprise resource planning (ERP) companies offering CRM have short-falls. According to Caretsky, “Managing the sales cycle and sales representative performance, marketing campaign management and integration with customer support are not provided by ERP tools.”
Indeed, stand alone industrial CRM solutions may also provide effective lean CRM processes as long as the vendor truly understands the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the manufacturing sector, but most don't. Offering a glorified database satisfactory to any type of organization doesn't address the central issues facing all industrial operations.
As Caretsky notes, “Industrial companies with complex products and solutions must be driven by quality best practices around industrial selling, rapid system start-up, effective sales team adoption and use. Each of these issues is a unique reality of quality lean principles for industrial sales and marketing.”
Manufacturing Journalist, Thomas R. Cutler recently wrote a feature article about industrial CRM for Quality Digest. The full feature article may be read at http://qualitydigest.com/QDarticles/FMPro?-db=iq%5feditorial.fp5&-lay=article%20data%20form&editorial%20type=QIArticle&release=yes&-format=QDarticle_text.html&articleID=9961&-script=cntaccesstype&-Find
Commence offers industrial companies complete “Freedom of Choice” to select the solutions and platform that best meets the business requirements of manufacturers and distributors. The comprehensive CRM Industrial application suite is available for use on premise or on-demand as a hosted service. Industrial leaders often build departmental CRM solutions with the award winning Commence Industrial CRM Framework. These choices are why so many industrial companies choose Commence as the solution for managing customer relationships. All Commence Industrial solutions support mobile or wireless connectivity and integration to back-office accounting and ERP systems.
Commence Corporation
www.commence.com/mfg/
Larry Caretsky
Marketing ( @ ) commence dot com
732-380-9100
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