SAP CRM reality or hype ?
28-Jun-2005
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am doing my master project at Copenhagen Business
school in Denmark (www.cbs.dk) and my project is" If SAP CRM provides
challenging solution to the sales organizations".
I am evaluating SAP CRM on the basis of :
. Functionalities (e.g opportunity management, territory management, leads management)
. Interaction channels (e.g e-commerce , field sales , call center )
. Integration with the legacy system
I need option about following statements:
1= SAP is not originated from CRM background and functionalities of SAP CRM are not comparable with specialized vendor like Siebel or salesforce.com. The difference between SAP and these specialized best of breed vendors are same as general doctor vs. specialized doctor. Give me your opinion?
2= Integration of SAP with back office ERP require professional services of consultant and integrators and On demand solution providers like salesforce.com requires less professional services as these services are web based delivered.
3= what is the current trend in ERP market? Are companies prefer to choose different vendors system - legacy system from one vendor and front office system (like CRM, supply chain management) from other vendor?
4= For example if a company has SAP ERP and while deciding about
front office application ( CRM system) they assume that SAP CRM doesn't support their all processes and then they decide to chose CRM system of Oracle . But they discover that cost of integration of Oracle CRM with SAP
ERP is quite high and it involves lot of efforts. What a company is going to do in such kind of situation?
. They will chose SAP CRM although it doesn't support all processes
. They will chose Oracle CRM
. What would you recommend
Aamir Bashir
MyCustomer.com 28-Jun-2005
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Answers
The trend in our market is to choose ONE vendor for both systems . This seems logical because the two different systems can be easily integrated . So, if a customer chooses SAP ERP , he will work with SAP CRM , if he chooses Microsoft Navision he will work on Navision's CRM capabilities
Many times the ERP suite is different from CRM system . This may happens because the customer believes that specific CRM functionality does not fit well with his way of working . A second reason may be that his ERP suite has got no such module (!) which is rather common in custom applications
In this case he has to find another's vendor CRM application and try to connect the two systems .He will face one basic problem : the data exchange between the two systems . I don't intend to analyse the alternatives but , mainly, he will choose to import data from ERP to CRM . Trying to install a full online system will be rather expensive and douptfully succesfull
As far as #4 question is concerned , I would advice him to choose the SAP ERP module and avoid making experiments ! This will cost him more than implementing SAP CRM