A lot has been said and written about the historical promise of CRM initiatives and how they failed to deliver the hyped-up transformational business benefits (to customers and vendors.) Then came along the hype of SaaS or Cloud as the manna for all past CRM evils from pure-play / standalone vendors like salesforce.com and others. Sure, SaaS has indeed transformed a lot of things about speed and ease of solution delivery as well as the short-term cost advantages. SaaS has also forced on-premise software vendors to re-architect their solutions to become nimble and easier to consume; which, overall is great progress for mankind. However, the fundamental question still remains: “Have these pure-play CRM SaaS vendors delivered transformation business value simply by serving the same Kool-Aid through a pipe vs. a bottle?”
Hardly. Standalone or silo applications are isolated islands of limited business value no matter how they are delivered. Siebel lived through the hype of standalone CRM for quite a while before ending up in Oracle’s arms when they realized that an end-to-end solution approach was the real way forward (Tom Siebel himself said this when Siebel got acquired.) Soon as the hype of SaaS and Cloud starts to wear off, the market will again start to question the real value of silo-based SaaS approaches and, consequently, their end is predictable as well unless they transform quickly – which is non-trivial as we know.
The proof is in the real transformational customer successes resulting from adoption of the integrated business process approach. Let’s look at one extremely compelling and transformational customer success story. Omnicell, a medical device maker, decided to replace their Siebel CRM point solution with SAP CRM to secure a true 360 degree view of their customers across front and back-office. By doing so, Omnicell has achieved a major transformation in being able to consistently deliver exactly what the customer wants. Today, at Omnicell, order accuracy has reached 99%, and the company can now easily track the on-time delivery rate of its third-partly logistics (3PL) provider. Shipping errors have been eliminated. Manufacturing can release new products to Sales on request, rather than quarterly and support incidents are down 67%. Now, this is transformational business value for a CRM initiative.
Such transformations are no way achievable through silo-based CRM approaches even if you hire an army of people to manually handle process transitions or spend inordinate amounts of money and resources to build all the complex plumbing. And this, by the way, is not easy to do in any reasonable time frame!
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