Question

400 words for each question. no copy and paste

What is the difference between operational and analytical CRM? Explain them briefly.

Why would a company want to implement an employee relationship management system?

Discuss the components in a core ERP system?

How does a company measure the success of an ERP system? Briefly explain the three different ERP implementation choices?

Answer 1

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Part A) The difference between operational and analytical CRM

Operational CRM

• Operational CRM helps to streamline the overall operational and business processes which include automation in sales, marketing and service functions.
• The objective of operational CRM is to help in lead generation, conversion into contacts and helps in acquiring all details so that servicing is done during the customer lifecycle.
• It is further categories into sales force automation, marketing automation & service automation.
• The sales force automation helps to automate the entire sales process giving data related to leads & contacts, track customer choices, helps in performance management etc.
• Marketing automation helps to maintain marketing and brand standards and streamlines the entire process. It helps to inform the sales team about and new opportunities and trends.
• Service automation helps to manage the overall customer service aspect. It includes things like call and data management, knowledge management etc. Based on key indicators it helps to analyse and improve the quality of product services.

Analytical CRM

• Analytical CRM is for the higher level of management, marketing and brand, sales and support personnel in the organisation to help understand the best way to serve its customer needs.
• Analytical CRM used data analysis as its main function. It helps to understand and analyse customer data from all sources and gives insights about the current status of the enterprise.
• It helps to give data analysis in the form of key performance indicators and key strategies to market better customer services.
• The analytical CRM helps to understand sales, financial and marketing data.
• The sales data will have information like purchase history, returns filed by customers and also various preferences of brands.
• Financial data will provide insights into credit history and related scores, payment processes and its types etc.
• Marketing data is used in analysis customer response to various brand campaigns and commercials, it gives repeat customer and retention data and provides information to improve customer satisfaction.

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Part B) Why would a company want to implement an employee relationship management system? Discuss the components in a core ERP system?

The employee relationship management system helps a company to effectively and efficiently manage all interaction & communication with its team members. It supports the organisation to achieve the organisation goals and vision.

• It helps to maintain a good & amicable relationship at the workplace between all members and leaders.
• The process helps to build employee satisfaction and increased productivity.
• An effective ERM system helps to reduce conflicts, reduces turnover & unnecessary costs associated with re-hiring and training processes.
• The ERM system helps to build a learning environment which helps in employee development. It helps to develop a culture of innovating thinking and build the teamwork culture in the organisation.

Components in core ERP systems:

1. Human Resources: This is the main core component of ERP systems. The ERP systems help to handle the entire spectrum of employee management processes like recruitment, offboarding, attendance management and other administrative processes. Example: by adding a payroll software the overall manual cost of handling the processes is reduced.
2. The customer relationship management component in ERP systems helps to track all the customer and market lead generation related data. It helps the team to effectively manage marketing and sales goals achievement efforts.
3. Business Intelligence is another key component that helps ERP to collect data, provide actionable outcomes and data analysis related to the employee relationship management process. It helps to provide a visual and dynamic reports covering all aspects & trends from the data.
4. Inventory management is another key component of core ERP systems. It works in synergy with the supply chain management systems and gives analysis for warehousing, transportation and sales process as well.
5. Supply chain management and financial management are other keys components for core ERP processes. A financial management component helps to analyse all financial data and historical reports. It also supports providing forecasts related to finances leading to better decision making, risk management and more profits. The financial management component includes information related to accounts payable, account receivables, budgets, cost and revenue sheets, break-even analysis etc.
6. The supply chain management component holds a lot of importance to survive in a highly competitive market. The data allows the team to fix issues and also helps to give real-time authentic data making decision effective.

It is important to do a thorough research about all the components and features available in the market. The implementation team should extensively research every aspect of business and decided component accordingly. A wrong decision can impact the overall change management aspect and a new system requirement comes sooner than expected.

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Part C) How does a company measure the success of an ERP system? Briefly explain the three different ERP implementation choices?

To measure the success of an ERP system it is important that it contributes to a lot of functions like sales, marketing and brand, product development, payroll and strategic planning. The success of ERP systems depends on its ability to customise and ease in usage. The ability to customise helps to set the processes according to company focus and automation strategy.

A successful ERP system will have all the updated elements like data storage on clouds and other backup mechanisms. It will allow mobile access and even uploading of important information and data.

A successful ERP system will help to improve various departmental processes, reduce communication gaps, improve the customer relationship and helps in achieving goals and vision of the organisation.

Here are the overall factors through which we can measure ERP success:

• It should lead to a clear and common understanding of strategic goals and plans.
• The success will depend on the support and commitment of top-level management and leaders of the organisation.
• The organisation change management approach should be good. The employee should embrace change and understand the future advantages it will have.
• The success also rests on a well trained and motivated implementation team for ERP.
• The data has to be highly accurate and verifiable. Once the data is shared the team must provide training and learning to members to understand how to implement it effectively.

Here are the three different ERP Implementation Choices:

1. Enterprise-wide full installation approach: This is a traditional and common approach. It helps to counter the challenge of employee cooperation and accepting the change through bringing such systems. This approach requires backing by top-level management and leaders and smooth transition process so that team member adapts to the change.
2. Unit by Unit implementation approach is another widely used method. This is successful in companies which have fewer processes. The team lead or top level management can decide a core operation team having flexible and change acceptable team members to pilot the system. Even though the process is time-consuming its sets a case study for the entire organisation and helps to bring change easily.
3. Key & strategic process installation approach - In this approach the company focus on a particular process for ERP installation. An example would include starting with customer service ERP installation to track leads and experience. This approach requires training time on new aspects or features before it is brought into action. It is a viable approach and helps in the prioritisation of the key function to be handled through the ERP process approach.

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