Database Reference
In-Depth Information
(RBE) has the ability to recognize and interact with different types of customers. The Enterprise
uses these dynamic interactions to discover its customers through customer-related and customer's
need-related information and create value by organizing itself to serve those customers. Customers
and their corresponding needs are changing constantly depending on the market environment
and, therefore, it is only because of these dynamic interactions that it can continue to discover the
current needs of its customers.
1.3.2 The Information-Driven Enterprise
The combined impact on companies of increasing product complexity together with increased
variety has been to create a massive problem of information management and coordination.
Information-based activities now constitute a major fraction of all activities within an enterprise.
Information-based organizations alone can enable companies to survive in the dynamically chang-
ing global competitive market. Only integrated, computer-based information systems such as SAP
CRM are (and can be) enablers for this kind of enterprise-level collaboration.
The information-based organization as proposed by management theorist Peter Drucker is a
reality today; correspondingly, companies are compelled to install both end user and work-group-
oriented enterprise-level integrated computing environments. Only information-based extended
organizations can possibly store, retrieve, analyze, and present colossal amount of information
at the enterprise level that is also up to date, timely, accurate, collated, processed, and packaged
dynamically for both external and internal customers. It should be noted that this subsection title
uses the phrase
information driven
rather than
information based
. The primary reason for that is
technology in the 1990s permits us to use information as a resource that is a legitimate substitute
for conventional resources.
1.3.3 The Process-Oriented Enterprise
CRM packages like SAP CRM enable an organization to truly function as an integrated orga-
nization—integration across all functions or segments of the traditional value chain: sales order,
production, inventory, purchasing, finance and accounting, personnel and administration, and
so on. They do this by modeling primarily the business processes as the basic business entities of
the enterprise, rather than by modeling data handled by the enterprise (as done by the traditional
IT systems). Every CRM might not be completely successful in this; however, in a break with
the legacy enterprise-wide solutions, SAP CRM treats business processes as more fundamental
than data items.
Collaborations or relationships manifest themselves through the various organizational and
interorganizational processes. A
process
may be generally defined as the set of resources and activi-
ties necessary and sufficient to convert some form of input into some form of output. Processes
are internal, external, or a combination of both; they are cross functional boundaries; they have
starting and ending points; and they exist at all levels within the organization.
The significance of a process to the success of the enterprise's business is dependent on the
value, with reference to the customer, of the collaboration that it addresses and represents. Or, in
other words, the nature and extent of the value addition by a process to a product or services deliv-
ered to a customer is the best index of the contribution of that process to the company's overall
customer satisfaction or
customer collaboration
. Customer knowledge by itself is not adequate; it
is only when the organization has effective processes for sharing this information and integrating
