Houston Rise And Fall
The rise of customer and supply chain management applications has forced a change in SAP ERP Houston Council Members integration strategies. The words of Peter Page, retired executive with Software AG, encapsulate a debate that has been centre stage since SAP introduced R/3, the first truly integrated client/server enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications suite.
Today, of the 8,000-plus R/3 installations, only 50 per cent are fully productive, largely because of the need to re-engineer business processes, but also because of the requirement to integrate existing legacy systems to the R/3 suite. If this isn't enough to give decision-makers palpitations about their investment in integrated ERP, the emergence of customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) systems certainly is. New vendors such as Siebel Systems (CRM) and i2 Technologies (SCM) have come from almost nowhere, and successfully wiped the smiles off the faces of the fat cat enterprise application vendors.
The CRM and SCM vendors promise staggering return on investment to SAP ERP Houston Council Members, but customers are being left in a potentially difficult position. While vendors can demonstrate the logic to support the ROI story, they have to integrate with ERP or legacy applications because the bulk of what they need comes from backbone operational systems. In a supply chain application, the integration points are relatively easy to spot. In this context, it doesn't necessarily follow that an ERP system need be in place.
For example, at Clarks Shoes the supply chain system is being piloted before attention is given to replacing legacy transaction systems, on the grounds that early projects need to generate returns to fund later projects. This translates into three discrete solutions to the problems of demand planning, supply chain and store replenishment. As Clarks has found, the supply chain market is relatively immature and just getting it all to work is hard enough. CRM presents a different proposition to SAP ERP Houston Council Members. Although CRM applications need operational data, it is not always necessary for them to integrate to an ERP suite. They may migrate, but in the meantime the emphasis is on improving front office efficiency. However, this is a horribly confused market where the vendors agree that definition problems mask a multitude of positioning issues. Furthermore, any analysis looking over, say, three years has to realise that systems, interaction points and workflow integration will become critical. For example, sales force automation enables the sales manager to automate the management processes connected with sales activities and provides a mechanism through which information about customers in the sales cycle can be shared and reported upon. What happens if one wishes to use some of the data generated by the SFA system to kick off an automated marketing campaign based on sales effectiveness? Or when you want to feed information about customer profitability back to the sales department's databases as part of a customer weeding programme?
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