Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Never before has it been so easy for a customer to find a desired product or service along with
contextual data necessary to make an informed purchase decision. Companies need to truly focus
on sensing, feeling, thinking, relating, and acting to each individual customer. This is the best
example of a
high-tech and high-touch
organization. Customers are no more than a click away from
a world of comparative information about products, prices, and alternatives that are resulting in
heightened competition among the suppliers. Companies need to respond rapidly and profitably
to this generation of net-savvy and opportunistic customers who are perpetually on the verge of
switching or clicking to alternate suppliers.
The power of the customer will continue to grow to unprecedented levels with the ever-
increasing ability to shop and buy anything from any one at any price at any time anywhere.
2.6.1 Event-Driven Business Systems
Unlike the make-to-stock strategy that has dominated since the 1980s, the millennium enter-
prises must adopt the strategy of make-to-order, or even beyond to a
sense and respond
to the
customized requirements of individual customers. In fact, the JIT philosophy for increasing the
efficiencies and effective responsiveness of the supply chains would have to surpass itself to become
synchronized with the actual event of an order being placed by the customer, which will truly
become the universal point of purchase (POP). It is in this sense that the market is moving rapidly
toward the event-driven enterprise where all actions are actually triggered by the click of the cus-
tomer on the personalized WUIs of enterprises.
All actions of procurement, production, dispatch, and collection will result from the subse-
quent cascade of events triggered within the enterprise and the extended enterprise. The lines
among the CRM, eCRM, ERM, and back-of-office systems like ERP and SCM are blurring. This
will lead organizations to shed the monolithic, vertically integrated infrastructures of the past and
embrace loosely coupled, independent, and Internet-agile organizations that engage collectively to
address a momentary customer transaction.
2.7 Summary
The real power of this concept can be seen when we go beyond the boundaries of an enterprise.
In the last chapter of this topic, we look beyond the physical conines of an enterprise to include its
partners like vendors and customers into an extension of the enterprise to the next higher level of
what we term as the Extended Collaborative Enterprise (ECE). We also introduced the powerful
notion of the
Customer-Triggered Company
as an event-driven enterprise where all actions are trig-
gered by the
click of the customer
on the personalized Web user-interfaces WUIs of the enterprises.
SAP has adopted a symbiotic strategy to go beyond simple integration to collaboration between
the customer-centric enterprises.
