For any business to extract maximum benefit from its CRM deployment, it is important that it be linked to the back processes. Supply chain management, when connected via business intelligence tools with CRM, can throw light on many hitherto unknown aspects of a company’s business processes.
The insight offered by CRM into customer behavior and demand patterns can be made use of to streamline manufacturing and distribution of products as managed by the supply chain function. An important feature to understand when deploying CRM is that it can only provide information that has to be used both at the front end and back end to improve processes. Customer segmentation information can be used to structure the purchase of raw materials, scheduling manufacturing, managing inventory, and overall running the supply chain. A business can obtain major cost savings by acting upon information from CRM systems.
A streamlined supply chain is key to reaching out to the right consumer at the right time and CRM offers inputs on providing the customers with the right product mix and targeting them with appropriate marketing. A backward integration of processes taking into account the information obtained from CRM can help a business better allocate its resources be they in manufacturing, processing, marketing, or sales. Apportioning of raw materials to machines and machines to a given product can be done more accurately if market demands are known; it also leads to a reduction of inventory stocks, JIT production, and a lean supply chain that responds to demands quickly. All this not only helps cut costs but also acquire a competitive advantage for a business that can take the lead in offering a better buying experience and service level that competitors may not be able to offer.
An efficient and responsive supply chain can have a huge positive impact on store product segmentation and effective customer targeting. Integration between CRM and SCM improves communication between the store and the manufacturing. For retail businesses such integration can imply a lot of benefits such as better distribution to retail outlets over various geographic locations; feedback to suppliers, distributors, transporters, etc. The use of BI for predicting performance at individual stores that can be aggregated to obtain a holistic picture of the supply chain is relevant to the entire exercise. Businesses can ensure the availability of quick-moving items and reduce the likelihood of losing customers.
A wider view of the happenings at the retail level can also help to take ad hoc decisions when pressed for time. Marketing and sales can coordinate more fruitfully with the supply chain to move or divert goods to given locations during peak seasons or for promotional purposes. Viewing data pulled from marketing, sales, supply chain, finance etc on a single dashboard can enable management as well as store managers to take profitable decisions on cross-selling and up-selling across different channels.
Sherman Hsieh is founder and CEO of Gate58 Marketing. Prior to founding Gate58 Marketing, Sherman was a marketing executive with Siebel Systems. Sherman is also founder and CEO of VendorDemo.
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