Daiju,
although most of the Fortune 1000 companies bought into the hype, almost everyone has come to the conclusion that the costs of implementation are not worth the advantages which ERP provides.
I think that's an overstatement. If "almost everyone" has come to that conclusion, it's hard to explain how just one company, SAP, sold $5 billion of the stuff in a relatively down year.
For example, supermarket loyalty cards is a facet by CRM. These cards were meant to analyze each customer's buy and sell activity in order to enable one-to-one marketing. However, most supermarkets are not utilising the data which they are receiving, just as many businesses were not able to take advantage of the features of ERP.
It's also been documented that most companies don't answer the e-mail at their website. That doesn't mean those businesses aren't able to take advantage of the features of websites and e-mail. It only means they haven't chosen to take advantage of them.
The theories/capabilities of CRM (and ERP) seem to be great, but that does not mean that it will be successful. Cost and difficulty of implementation and the challenges of customizing the CRM to fit each business' needs may cause it to go down the same road as ERP.
Certainly two of the biggest obstacles to success with CRM are getting everyone in the enterprise to buy into the concept and doing enough planning and employee training to ultimately fully realize the potential benefits. This becomes especially important because customization appears to be more necessary for CRM than for ERP.
However, I sure hope CRM "goes down the same road as ERP" as you put it. I could live with that kind of growth. Most projections are that the CRM market will eventually exceed the ERP market, mostly because CRM can be more easily and economically automated for small businesses than ERP.
1) Does SEBL provide a way to integrate e-commerce, TERM, CRM, and SCM to "smooth or enhance operations across the value chain"?
I don't know what TERM is. My acronym finder sez it's either "tank extended range munition" or "terminal mangement systems." Please clarify.
Siebel and its competitors are certainly working on smoothing out the related operations you mention, but it's a fairly recent development that I gather still leaves plenty of opportunity for growth.
According to Gartner:
the e-business reality is that Technology Enabled Relationship Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Supply Chain Management are not integrated and therefore cannot be used to smooth or enhance operations across the value chain.
If you want to really read some negative stuff, be sure to catch the stuff that AMR sez. Yet they project CRM revenue growing 50% annually through 2003.
Although SEBL seems to be the dominant player in CRM, how do the numbers match up against Trilogy and Vantive?
I'll let you do your own homework about that.
how do you guys feel about CRM's possible decline a la ERP? Even if it does, I guess SEBL could still be a profitable investment for awhile, but not a Gorilla investment.
Honestly, I gather from the tenor of your post that you seem to be so convinced that ERP is (was) a bad place to be and that CRM is destined to be the same that I'd encourage you to find a different gorilla to tangle with. There are lots of them out there, especially among the applications software companies. You shouldn't feel any pressure to invest in a CRM company.
SAP seemed like a Gorilla (I bought into it), but I guess the Tornado never really formed.
The ERP companies "grew client/server application revenue from $187 million in 1991 to $5.9 billion in 1995." (The revised manual, page 257.) That's 137% average annual growth, a tornado by virtually any measure.
That tornado spawned SAP, the gorilla. In five years it went from being practically unheard of to the fourth largest independent software company in the world. My guess is that you got into SAP after the tornado ended.
CRM has been around for as long as ERP
For the most part I agree with you. However, ERP as a client/server solution was an extension of much earlier back-office automation using mainframe computing. Back-office automation has its roots in the '70s and '80s, whereas front-office automation has its roots almost entirely as recently as the 90s. To say that CRM has been around as long as ERP is technically true, but very misleading if we don't appreciate the full context of back-office and front-office automation.
How do we know that the Big Five and other consultancies are not just trying to sell another flavor of the month?
Actually, I can almost guarantee you that they are. If you were selling ice cream and knew that a particular flavor was expected to grow 50% annually for years to come, wouldn't you promote that flavor?
One question for you: Have you read the CRM Software Case Study in either version of the manual?
--Mike Buckley |
