Vendors That Offer ERP for Services in SaaS Business Models

To facilitate the ERP initiatives of SMB organizations in the services sector, there are a number of vendors that have leveraged the SaaS business model. Keep in mind that the majority of organizations benefiting from this model fall within the category of lower midsized and small organizations. Vendors that fit the bill include the following:

* Sage offers a SaaS option in both its Accpac and MAS product lines. Sage Accpac online provides SMB organizations with Sage Accpac 100 ERP for small organizations and Sage Accpac 200 ERP for midsized environments through an on demand model. Both products offer a solid accounting package for both market segments. However, they are not as strong in areas such as CRM and PSA. In addition, Sage MAS 500 delivers a stronger SaaS offering because of its application service provider (ASP) partnership with IBM. Lastly, MAS 500 delivers a more complete PSA offering for project-centric organizations.

* Intuit delivers ERP-like functionality primarily for smaller organizations via its QuickBooks online offering. Through its strategic relationships with salesforce.com and Projector PSA , QuickBooks delivers basic ERP functionality specific to very small professional services organizations over the Internet at an affordable price.

* Intacct offers a SaaS financial package for the SMB marketplace. Through its technology partnership with Openair, one of the leading niche PSA players, Intacct delivers a fully integrated ERP suite. Moreover, Openair's original equipment manufacturer (OEM) relationship with Intacct offers best-of-breed functionality in PSA and accounting, making it an excellent contender to NetSuites ERP solution.

* NetSuite is likely the best example of a fully integrated ERP system offered through a SaaS model for the SMB market. Delivering complete back-office (accounting, human resources [HR], purchasing, financials, etc.) and powerful CRM capabilities, NetSuite offers users a fully integrated, Web-based solution in a single source code. Its capabilities are better suited for the services sector, such as professional services organizations, nonprofits, and advertising, with modules in financials, CRM, purchasing, payroll, and inventory. However, portfolio management and resource management capabilities critical to project-centric organizations are not as strong as those delivered by niche PSA vendors.

* Microsoft offers its range of ERP solutions through its Dynamics product line. Dynamics SL is Microsofts PSA solution that provides complete project accounting capabilities. Dynamics GP offers a light ERP system that delivers mostly back-office functionality. For larger organizations, Dynamics AX offers stronger back-office capabilities with the deeper ERP functionality required for more complex organizations, such as those in the upper mid and enterprise markets. Microsoft delivers its SaaS model for these products through its SPLA partner program, which allows service providers to deliver Microsoft solutions through an online subscription model.

* SAP offers its Business One ERP solution for the SMB market. Although better suited for the distribution and manufacturing industries, Business One delivers strong back-office and CRM functionality to the services sector. As for the companys SaaS offering, SAP provides its partners with the option of holding licenses and having their users pay a subscription fee to access an online, hosted version of Business One.

* Oracle delivers its ERP offering to the SMB market with its Oracle eBusiness Suite Special Edition. Similar to SAP, Oracle's SMB offering is stronger for the distribution and manufacturing sectors. In terms of delivering solid back-office and CRM capabilities, Oracle is worth considering for SMB organizations in the services sector. From a SaaS point of view, Oracle has a well developed on demand program to host its ERP applications. However, Oracle has not yet fully embraced the SaaS model, and the vendors clients are still required to purchase licenses and maintenance for its applications.

"ERP for SMB"? Or "Accounting on Steroids"

Since the recent rise in popularity of SaaS and the entrance of tier one vendors into the SMB market, the ERP acronym has extended its definition to include accounting and financial software vendors that have serviced this market segment since the eighties. Leading vendors such as Sage, Intuit, and Microsoft have taken advantage of ERP's expanded definition. These vendors have branded their accounting solutions as ERP for SMBs by delivering an integrated offering through a SaaS business model. Microsoft has its Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) partner program to deliver its SaaS offering, whereas Sage and Intuit have online subscription models for a number of their products. The SaaS business model has enabled vendors to deliver affordable, integrated ERP solutions to SMBs simply by providing add-on components to their accounting packages. Hence, SMB service organizations are presented with a variety of options offered from basic accounting solutions that can quickly deliver ERP solutions by leveraging the Internet as the platform of choice. QuickBooks' Online Edition exemplifies this point by allowing the smallest of service organizations to subscribe to its service. Quickbooks provides SMBs the option to include online add-ons that can integrate salesforce.com for CRM and Projector PSA for their project time and billing requirements, thereby delivering a seamless ERP offering. Although by no means will QuickBooks identify itself as an ERP solution, nevertheless, QuickBooks' SaaS model empowers small organizations to build a solution that can meet most of their business needs.

The ubiquity of the Internet has opened the ERP door to many vendors that have not had access to this market before. By leveraging the Internet, the SaaS model has allowed software vendors that specialize in back-office systems to embrace the ERP acronym. The definition of ERP has broadened to include all integrated systems that automate and streamline an organizations operations. Formerly, ERP systems focused specifically on delivering enterprise-wide solutions to large manufacturing organizations; today, users are faced with the challenge of sifting through the ever growing pool of solutions branded ERP. As a result, this has left user organizations with a wide range of systems that pitch ERP solutions, but these systems may or may not provide fully integrated functionality to support users' business requirements. In the SMB world, systems range from full-blown ERP systems (like NetSuite) to basic accounting systems (like Quickbooks). Although labels can be misleading, at the end of the day, users need to be diligent in determining their business requirements to find the solution that fits best.

ERP for Services: Integrated Versus Best-of-Breed

Today's ERP for services marketplace has upped the ante in delivering affordable, fully integrated ERP systems. The rising popularity of SaaS as a delivery model has pitted integrated ERP systems against best-of-breed solutions for SMB organizations in the services sector. SaaS has "leveled the playing field" among integrated ERP solutions like NetSuite and niche ERP and professional services automation (PSA) players like Openair and QuickArrow by providing an affordable delivery model and eliminating the complexities of on-site implementations. In light of this, niche ERP and PSA players are faced with the challenge of developing strategies that provide end-to-end solutions for their clients in order to compete with full-blown ERP systems. A number of PSA vendors have developed SaaS partnerships in order to deliver competitive ERP offerings. In fact, PSA vendor OpenAir exemplifies this strategy by delivering a seamless, integrated ERP offering in conjunction with accounting vendor Intacct. Consequently, SaaS has empowered a number of vendors to deliver affordable, integrated ERP solutions through both single and multiple offerings by reducing the risk and cost typically associated with large scale ERP implementations.

Enterprise Resource Planning for Services: Has Software as a Service Become Service-oriented Architecture for Small to Medium Businesses

In a market where labels define software vendors, the power of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) acronym has permeated the small to medium business (SMB) market. Tier one and best-of-breed vendors are embracing the ERP label as the message of choice to its clients, especially in the services sector where ERP is less mature. As organizations seek enterprise solutions to meet their business requirements, they are faced with the challenge of deciphering which solutions best suit their needs.

Everywhere one turns, a services component is incorporated into the latest and greatest offering pitched by ERP vendors. For many vendors targeting the enterprise market, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the technology of choice; for those targeting the SMB market, software as a service (SaaS) is the technology of choice. These new approaches to selling ERP solutions are claimed to be more efficient, affordable, and simpler ways to reduce costs and address integration issues common in company-wide ERP implementations. By leveraging the Internet, the services model offered by SOA and SaaS has made ERP more attractive to all market segments.

In the past, smaller organizations would not consider ERP initiatives due to ERPs exorbitant costs. ERP implementations were associated with multimillion dollar engagements that demanded the support of a team of consultants that was hired to overhaul an organization's entire information technology (IT) infrastructure and operational systems. The entire process would be spread out over many months, and in some cases, years. With the recent trend of software vendors offering SaaS business models, ERP implementations have become a viable solution for even the smallest of organizations. SaaS has empowered small businesses to reap the benefits of full-blown ERP systems without the costs of maintaining a comprehensive IT infrastructure or the initial investment of purchasing software licenses. Consequently, ERP initiatives have recently piqued the interest of SMB organizations in a number of service sectors.

Defining SOA and SaaS

At a high level, SOA is a technological platform that organizations employ to standardize the interaction and collaboration of disparate applications. Although this can be achieved through various means, web services have become popular methods employed by ERP for services vendors when implementing an SOA framework. Numerous organizations implement SOA in which web applications interact with each other with standard protocols that can include extensible markup language (XML) running over hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI), and simple object access protocol (SOAP). The benefits of SOA include a cost-efficient way of responding to changes in an organization by reusing services to modify business processes as needed without re-architecting entire systems. In addition, the incremental modular deployment and platform independence of an SOA framework is another advantage that is commonly promoted by vendors.

From a cost and benefit point of view, the SaaS business model delivers similar advantages to the SMB marketplace. By leasing software from vendors as needed via the Internet, organizations can implement a full-blown ERP system in a cost-effective manner. Similar to an SOA philosophy, SaaS enables SMB organizations to quickly implement or modify applications by using the Internet as a single source (platform) to run their businesses. The main difference lies in the management of an organization's infrastructure and applications. For vendors offering ERP for services, SOA is typically designed for organizations to manage their ERP systems internally. SaaS, on the other hand, is fully managed remotely by the vendor delivering the ERP system to SMB organizations, many of which do not have the expertise, infrastructure, or financial means to manage these systems themselves.

Bolstering the Call Center with Service Resolution Management Processes

In general, it makes economic sense for companies to pursue an SRM strategy, since in the all-too-common scenario of using disparate KM, CRM, and search applications, despite all of the resources at hand, the customer is hardly ever provided with any resolution, except to take a look at the competitive offering (in disgust). Conversely, the scenarios in which an SRM approach is taken should enable the contact center agent to satisfy the customer's needs and increase the economic value of that customer to the organization.

By using advanced KM technologies, users can create a cross-channel approach to help automate service resolution in the enterprise, so that all of the valuable information in all of those disparate systems is tied together in one common knowledge platform, which is then made available to the agents, customers, and the enterprise. Indeed, it should not matter if a customer query comes in at the call center or at the help desk, or via e-mail, phone, or the web site, since the correct answer to the query should be accurate and consistent across all channels, and it should reflect the outcome that the selling company desires.

However, while the potential for self-service and SRM to reduce costs and improve service quality is indisputable, it is an extremely complex model to deliver, since self-service capabilities usually require multiple layers of technology across each service channel. Companies do best when implementing it in a step-wise fashion, starting with something as simple as providing answers to FAQs, and moving up to allowing customers to execute complex transactions (like changing preferences for a service) on their own.

Standardizing on a set of packaged CRM applications helps when integrating self-service and SRM across channels. Yet most companies will still need to buy best-of-breed "e-service" products to provide live chat, e-mail response management, customer search, and other key features needed for self-service over the Web. User companies must be prepared to make a reasonable investment in their transaction architecture in order to facilitate self-service and to handle the higher volume of interactions with customers.

Companies must also identify the metrics they will need to measure their self-service efforts. Though a service center is still largely viewed as a cost center, many traditional metrics are not appropriate any longer. A multitude of factors can impact a call center's key performance indicators (KPIs), and this is before any attempt is made to implement and deploy the multichannel call center agent concept.

Therefore, KPIs, such as average wait-time, first call closure rates, cost per call, and average call duration, must be closely monitored as the program is rolled out. These should all drop as the call center agents begin to successfully and uniformly manage multiple channels. For Internet-based systems, the proper KPI might be the number of transactions completed without a customer having to pick up the phone, while for an IVR system, it could be the number of customer calls completed without human assistance.

Ultimately, companies need to know if customers have found what they needed and if they have gone away happy. But answering these simple questions can often mean wading through a disparate mix of click stream data, e-service usage logs, CRM analytics, analytic reporting, and more.

Well-designed applications that are consistent with other self-service channels and that are integrated with assisted-service channels as required, such as the telephone or a live chat feature, are critical, not only for self-service adoption, but also for overall customer satisfaction marks. Self-service fails when it tries to anticipate as many calls as possible but ends up delivering hundreds of nuanced responses to the customer, none of which is quite right.

What Service Resolution Management Offers

Built on KM and search technologies, SRM (not to be confused with supplier relationship management) applications optimize the resolution process across multiple service channels, including contact centers, self-service Web sites, help desks, e-mail, and chat.

An SRM system creates a knowledge backbone for the seller company by creating a single interface that pulls vital information and knowledge from wherever it is stored, whether it is in the CRM system, legacy support systems, search engine, Web site, document libraries, etc. It allows the company, as a business leader, to evaluate what processes are taking place in its support environment and to then determine how it would like those processes to be handled. With this, the company can guide users step by step through the process of answering their questions, applying the right process to each inquiry to drive the outcome it wants.

Service resolution systems enable the company to harness all the tools and knowledge it has already acquired to solve customers' issues, regardless of what channel they use to tell the seller company about their issue. These SRM applications have to complement, integrate with, and enhance traditional CRM areas like sales force automation (SFA), marketing automation, contact center, and help desk applications by providing knowledge-based solutions that improve service delivery. Although still an emerging software category, existing SRM customers include some of the largest companies in the world, and SRM products have reportedly enabled these companies to reduce operating and service delivery costs, improve customer satisfaction, and increase revenues.

Here is an illustration: A service call (customer inquiry, complaint, etc.) comes in, and the agent fields it by performing a search. A technical bulletin, written by a product manager and stored on a network drive, comes up in the query results because the knowledge base searches both structured and unstructured knowledge. This very issue has been documented, and a resolution has been built to ensure that an answer can be provided. A wizard pops up and prompts the technical support agent to walk the customer through a setup process. The new product can then be used successfully, resulting in a happy customer.

This is the type of service the customer wants and what support systems are really trying to provide—seamless service resolution, which can only be provided by effectively using and managing corporate knowledge (i.e., the knowledge of products and services; diagnostic troubleshooting; information stored in all documents on the network drives, intranets, and e-mail systems; and, most important, the knowledge of the customers and support agents).

Bolstering Call Center (and Other CRM) Processes

The trend of customer service enablement and the nurturing of customer relationships (which have traditionally been the forgotten stepchildren of CRM) may be overtaking customer acquisition as a main driver of recent CRM deployments. Customer service has historically been provided primarily in person or over the telephone, with limited reference materials available for the customer service representative (CSR). This emerging business model assumes that companies that provide customer service over the telephone will find value in aggregating company knowledge by using the appropriate software, and will be willing to access the content over other channels, especially the Internet. The business model also assumes that companies will find value in providing some of their customer service over the Internet instead of by telephone.

In the past, customers would show a preference for a certain channel of communication with a company, but this is no longer the case. Customers now use several different channels available to ask for support and service and about upgrade issues, or to inquire about or request new products and services. And they expect to receive accurate, consistent information, regardless of the channel they are using. Service that does not meet these expectations is considered a waste of time, and a reason for the customer to seek out competitive offerings elsewhere.

The use of multiple channels for customer service and support, as well as the importance of consistent, accurate, and swift answers, is expected to only increase in the future. Companies are thus realizing that what their customers are seeking is knowledge (which is likely stored somewhere in the company, but more likely, scattered all over the company), and that these customers want it regardless of the channel they choose, be it telephone, Web self-service, e-mail, retail kiosk, or chat.

The logical question a company should ask itself is how it can provide customers with direct access to the knowledge they are looking for when that data may be residing in a variety of places. For example, product specifications, technical support, billing questions, and pricing and policy information can all be found in any number of places, such as CRM databases; legacy KM systems; frequently asked questions (FAQ) lists; intranets; content management systems; billing systems; or an automated response system. The goal here is to analyze the customer's problem, retrieve the information needed to solve that problem, and to do so in whichever contact channel the customer chooses. This process should not only minimize customer frustration and lower the cost of the support transaction, but it should also leave the customer delighted.

Although computer-telephony integration (CTI) systems do a great job at automating call routing and case management, Web sites have become ever glossier and animated, and CRM systems do a decent job of handling customer contacts (and possibly preferences) and product information, something is still missing to enable cohesive customer service. The plethora of new self-service technologies, such as natural language search engines, knowledge bases, guided navigation, user forums, collaboration, personalization, multichannel (e-mail, instant messenger [IM], integrated voice response [IVR], call centers), and so on, lead us to the emerging part of CRM software applications, specifically applications that enable customer service organizations to more effectively resolve service requests and answer questions.

Leverage Google Analytics to Enhance Marketing Awareness and Performance

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The Wizardry of Business Process Management – Part 1

It is truly difficult to argue against the need for companies from all walks of life to improve their business processes. Doing “better, faster, and cheaper” is the “slogan du jour.”

In his keynote presentation during the recent Lombardi Driven Online virtual conference, Lombardi Software’s CEO Ron Favaron referred to BPM as “Business Pressure Management.” That pretty much says it all. Logically, to the end of managing business pressures, Lombardi offers its broad BPM suite called TeamWorks Enterprise Edition [evaluate this product].

I also recently attended a Webcast by Appian Corporation, possibly the first BPM company to deliver process, knowledge, content, collaboration, and analytics capabilities in a comprehensive suite, Appian Enterprise [evaluate this product] and its software as a service (SaaS) counterpart Appian Anywhere. I particularly liked one slide in the presentation deck wherein the eight bullet points’ first letters cleverly spelled out the mnemonic REMEMBER (why to deploy BPM now) as follows:

* Retain customers
* Enhance standardization (and consistency)
* Measure business performance
* Evaluate components of processes (subprocesses)
* Manage all elements of the business
* Bottom line improvements
* Eliminate bottlenecks
* Rapidly deploy new services (and processes).

Indeed, these are some of the typical benefits of deploying BPM systems, but the trouble, called the lack of clarity and consensus, starts with the quandary about what exactly constitutes BPM, and what exact parts and capabilities of BPM help achieve those benefits? In other words, are there more important and better BPM suites and/or components vs. those that are of less importance?

In plain English, BPM entails all methodologies and tools that help businesses improve their processes. Depending on the context, BPM can be regarded as a management discipline, a technology, or even both. If one defines BPM as an approach to methodically design, implement, execute, control, and improve business processes, then one can argue that it is a management discipline. In addition, there exists a raft of accompanying IT tools to support this discipline in all of its abovementioned stages.

Project Management as the Change Agent in SCM’s Evolution

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”—Yogi Berra, US baseball player, coach, and manager.

The above quotation is a humorous reminder of how far technology has evolved, not just in our workplace, but in our personal lives as well. Recently, I was at home reading the newspaper when my teenage daughter walked into the living room with one of her friends. She took out her video MP3 player, and her friend was using the wireless PC to do her homework. I looked around and I thought, “if only they had the Internet when I was in college, how much easier my life would have been.” Perhaps I was being overly simplistic, but this illustrated to me just how—within a period of a single generation—some technological changes have impacted our day-to-day lives.

The dynamic environment that brought about these changes also illustrates some of our constraints. Change, as we know, is not only about technology; it is about managing people and processes through that change. In terms of enterprise solution implementation in an organization, many of us know firsthand how difficult it is to come to a consensus on a particular strategy or a process. Project managers have been, and will continue to be, at the forefront of the technological changes in the enterprise environment, as they are the group responsible for executing the vision of how to improve a key business process by the integration of a technological solution.

What Is Driving the Courier Industry’s Growth

Business shifts, including globalization, cost reduction, and consumer demand, have driven the courier industry’s rapid growth. Additionally, the shift of businesses manufacturing more in developing nations has meant an increase in the need for the international shipping of packages and documents.
Many organizations now also outsource their logistics and supply chain requirements to companies that provide complete, seamless logistics solutions. Such solutions or services may include distribution, vendor-managed inventory services, merchandise returns and order fulfillment, and replenishment activities. Managing the supply chain has become a strategic part of C-level discussions in corporate boardrooms.
The Role of Technology in Driving the Logistics Industry
Technology has played a major role in successfully building the supply chains of most organizations. Today, through the Internet, customers can place orders, calculate rates, schedule pickups, track shipments, and verify deliveries. What now seems to be commonplace functionality is actually the evolution of several technologies and philosophies fused into a unified set of solutions.A generation ago, simple material resource planning (MRP) evolved into MRP2. This evolution was an early introduction to the integration of other business applications, such as accounting with finance, finance with procurement, procurement with manufacturing, manufacturing with distribution, distribution with marketing, and marketing with sales. Thus, MRP2 morphed into today’s ERP, which covers the basic functions of an enterprise. Even non-manufacturing businesses, nonprofit organizations, and governments all now use an ERP system. For a complete list of available ERP systems.

The Wizardry of Closing Execution Gaps

Going back to Alan Trefler’s luncheon presentation, in summary, he concluded that it takes the following: corporate courage (not to flinch in these times, but to instead try to see what can be done), a BPM brain (to capture the business intent), and a heart (a service oriented architecture [SOA]-based infrastructure). This creative cinematic BPM metaphor did not come out of thin air, since the presentation took place exactly on the 70th anniversary of the great “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Another salient point in Trefler’s creative speech was that the market for BPM software is driven by competitive businesses that seek to close the execution gaps that may exist between their business objectives and their actual business processes. Pega’s target customers are large, industry-leading service organizations faced with managing transaction-intensive, complex and changing processes that seek the agility needed for growth, productivity, and regulatory compliance.

Financial services organizations require software to improve the quality, accuracy, and efficiency of customer interactions and transactions processing. Pega’s customer process management and exceptions management products allow its financial service customers to be more responsive to changing business requirements. Representative Pega’s financial services customers include Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse Group, HSBC Group Holdings, JPMorgan Chase & Co., National Australian Bank (NAB), and TD Bank Financial Group.

Pega’s financial industry knowledge and experience has resulted in solutions to help these customers close execution gaps and improve the following processes:

* In Bank Card Operations: Multi-channel service; Self-service account opening; Product roll-out; Fraud processing; Customer on-boarding, etc.
* In Retail Banking: Event-driven marketing; Account opening; New product introduction; Service case management; Specialized fulfillment, etc.
* In Wholesale Banking (e.g., wire transfers and treasury management): Proactive service monitoring; Account servicing; New product introduction; Compliance trade monitoring; Exception management, etc.

For their part, healthcare organizations seek products that integrate their front-office and back-office initiatives and help drive customer service, efficiency, and productivity. Representative Pega’s healthcare customers include: Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Group Health Cooperative, HealthNow New York, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (Kaiser Permanente), and Wellpoint.

The Wizardry of Business Process Management – Part 3

Companies have to optimize their processes through technology that automatically integrates new objectives into their systems to adjust for every specific situation. They need a “brain” that ensures that processes and decisions are optimized per these new objectives in both mainstream and exceptional situations.

The idea is to get the initial process quickly and iterate later. Business users can do it one customer issue at the time, starting with any business process that needs improvement: e.g., open a new account, charge dispute, detect fraud, increase credit line, handle a missed payment, and so on.

As said in Part 2, Pegasystems (also known as Pega) users can use the familiar Microsoft Visio diagramming tool to visually create (model) the processes that will deliver better customer service. There are many pre-built solution frameworks with industry best practices to get them jump-started if necessary.

But the second brick in the Yellow Brick Road is the ability of the technology to automate all necessary computer programming. Namely, business people can draw nice pictures and diagrams to capture objectives, but if between that model of what you want and ultimately running your business you need to do lots of tedious Java or C++ programming, you cannot be agile and nimble enough. To that technical end, the model that business users create should actually automate the programming that makes the business process run.

The final brick in the Yellow Brick Road of BPM is the automation of business processes that then “drives the work to be done” by, well, automating the actual work. In other words, the work is not merely tracked or routed for human intervention, but is also completed with the power of smart automation and minimal manual effort.

Nirvana would be to ultimately automate the work for people, who then only add value as required. Although the human touch is always needed, the point of business process automation (BPA) is to eliminate any distractions.

Again stepping out of Trefler’s presentation’s narrow scope, let me try to explain here how Pega’s SmartBPM suite really turns work automation into a tool for business changes on the fly. Let’s explore the “Six Rs” of driving work to be done via Pega’s BPM technology.

As the first “R,” the BPM product makes it easy for users to receive the work that needs processing. SmartBPM has a broad ability to receive input out-of-the-box from virtually any conceivable channel.

To that end, flexible, self-expanding extensible markup language (XML)-based data structures make it easy to capture whatever data, attachments, images, or other content may be appropriate, so that users can always have the right information at hand. Web services, e-mail notifications, and so on are all treated through a common software architecture, to ensure that processes designed for one particular channel can be leveraged in a multi-channel environment.

The second “R” stands for route. To that end, rules ensure optimal work management for either people or systems by organizing related work into Cases and Folders, thus prioritizing and managing them. The duplicate checking ability prevents redundancy, while skills-based routing (SBR) optimizes work assignments.

For the third “R” of automation, report, the system offers over 100 standard reports, plus an open database to integrate with other customer information and enterprise reporting systems. Canned reporting capabilities can even be extended to include real-time business activity monitoring (BAM). For instance, built-in Service Level Agreement (SLA) management and statistical sampling provide management impacts in real time.

Customers use these capabilities to coordinate and control key business functions. For example, National Australian Bank (NAB) uses SmartBPM to control the receipt, prioritization, and execution of billions of dollars of high value payments, ensuring that every wire transfer request is handled according to the best practice.

ScotiaMcLeod

ScotiaMcLeod, (www.scotiabank.com) is the investment arm of Scotiabank, one of Canada's largest financial organizations with over $280 billion in assets. ScotiaMcLeod's financial advisors specialize in helping individuals and small business customers plan financial solutions for trusts, estate planning, borrowing and banking services. ScotiaMcLeod has more than 800 financial advisors working in 84 branches across the country. According to Chris Carter, Associate Director and Branch Manager for ScotiaMcLeod's North Vancouver office, the financial services sector is a people-driven business where customer service is critical to success. Chris wanted the ability to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to provide services to his clients. He wanted to know if technology - specifically a customer relationship management (CRM) system - could help him promote a professional image and customer-oriented business philosophy at his branch as a way of putting clients at ease and attracting prospective clients who are searching for financial advice.
Problem / Challenge

Chris knew he needed to be proactive in order to keep existing clients happy and to build his base of new customers. Since his team of financial advisers contacts clients often and tracks accounts daily, he also knew that he would need a more effective CRM solution. "A client may be worth up to $50,000 for professional consulting and ongoing management fees," says Chris. "If customers are not tracked and followed up immediately we could easily lose them to another financial institution."

Prior to implementing a complete CRM strategy, Chris and his team developed a rudimentary in-house system using Microsoft Access. Each call the team received was looked up and then manually recorded into their database. "Our team was becoming frustrated with this technology as it was limiting them from reaching out to our customers in a more proactive way and giving them the type of quality attention for which ScotiaMcLeod is known," says Chris. "It was becoming increasingly difficult to stream line our sales operations and we knew something better was out there. We asked around and learned about Maximizer, a contact manager that we purchased to help us keep track of records of in our databases, create customer profiles, and create 'hot-list' tasks in our calendars as a reminder to follow up with each customer. It worked so well that I soon started thinking about the other processes I could automate to deliver more service to my customers."

As Chris and his team started learning more about their customer's preferences and behaviors, he realized he needed a comprehensive strategy to retain key customers. In order to build and maintain solid relationships with his clients, provide his team with the appropriate tools to help them achieve their goals, and provide exceptional customer service, Chris started searching for a complete CRM system that would help him build and enhance the activities he started with his contact manager. In addition, Chris wanted a CRM system that would help him run more sophisticated marketing programs as well as reporting tools to evaluate their progress.

Deploying Application and OS Virtualization Together: Citrix and Virtuozzo

Is it beneficial to use multiple types of virtualization software together? The answer: yes. Combining complementary virtualization technologies provides a stronger, more robust solution that reduces costs, maximizes return on investment (ROI), and minimizes the number of servers to manage. By consolidating these technologies, organizations can get the most out of the application, hardware, and operating system (OS).

Related Topics: IT Asset Management (ITAM), Data Management and Analysis, Application Server, Electronic Distribution and Storage, IT Infrastructure

Related Industries: Manufacturing, Retail Trade, Information, Finance and Insurance, Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Related Keywords: SWSoft, virtualization technologies, multiple technologies, ROI, hardware virtualization, application virtualization, virtual environments, VEs, resource management, two layers of OS