Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Organizations can maximize their channel partners' efficiency and productivity by ensuring that
their partners' incentives, resources, and objectives are fully aligned with those of the organization.
By providing organizations with real-time analytical ability to track and understand both
customer behavior and key performance indicators of corporate performance, SAP enables orga-
nizations to be
digitally wired
to their customers, channel partners, and employees. The result is a
total solution enabling organizations to fully focus the resources of their entire company on maxi-
mizing the value of their customer relationships. SAP enables organizations to overcome the five
major obstacles that typically thwart its way toward becoming a customer-centric organization:
◾
Information silos
: Organizations have a tendency to get fragmented into silos based on prod-
uct or line of businesses; this results in the customer data being scattered throughout the
organization in a disjointed fashion, which gives a highly fragmented and incomplete view
of their customers.
◾
Disconnected channels
: The organization lacks the ability to maintain a unified and coordi-
nated interface with the customer across different interactions through different channels;
this lack of synchronization invariably leads to a disjointed customer experience.
◾
Business processes that do not reflect best practices
: The organizational processes may not be
aligned with the customer-centric focus of the organization; for instance, instead of being
customer focused, many a time, business processes are optimized with reference to the back-
office functions of the organizations. Though this may not be without some advantages in
terms of back-office efficiencies, this may deny the organization the opportunity to achieve
increased revenues while reducing the costs.
◾
Poorly coordinated business or channel partners
: Organizational partners are not aligned with
the organizational objectives of delivering value to its customers; thus, though organizations
increasingly rely on partners to deliver value to its customers, they may not be able to moni-
tor and manage the performance of its partners.
◾
Unaligned employees
: Organization lacks systems to keep its employees informed and
resources to enable its employees to do their jobs effectively; managers do not have a means
to optimize workforce performance.
In addition to enhanced customer loyalty and retention, SAP's customer-focused e-business tech-
nology also delivers other measurable benefits that directly enhance an organization's effective-
ness, productivity, and revenue. All these collectively have a positive impact on the company's
performance in terms of
1. E-business applications improving the organization's effectiveness in sales, marketing, and
customer service, resulting in increased revenue because of factors such as more selling time
for salesman, higher-order sizes, and improved close rates for new leads
2. E-business applications increasing the productivity of the organization's sales, marketing,
and service operations, thus effectively reducing the costs of the revenue-producing resources
and increasing the availability of productive resources substantially (Table 5.1)
5.2.4 N-Tier Principle
N-Tier computing is a style of computing where the computer processing load is distributed across
several synchronously or asynchronously cooperating computer programs running on a single
computer or on a group. During the last decade of development, this has become one of the
