Alphabet Soup—Making Sense Out of Stew!

You are the typical corporate decision maker—too many things to do, not enough time, too little or too much information to support your decision making processes. What place does technology have in helping you through your day? How do you make sense of the myriad of solution offerings—ASP, BPM, CRM, and on and on? Where is the proverbial “holy grail” of technology?

The answer, sad to say, is that the grail is but a myth. The enlightened know that any business solution involves a balance between technology, your resources and your business processes. This is true of any system solution, but perhaps more so in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) domain than others. Why? For the simple reason that you probably cannot name anything that you do on a routine basis in your organization that does not directly or indirectly impact your customers. Think about it. Even more generically, can you think of any processes or people in your organization completely disconnected from all others?

Sorting Out The Choices

So, the various “alphabet soup” solutions are selling you and your constituents short. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the one that most acknowledge as the first “letter” of this alphabet, fell short. It did not reach across the entire enterprise. It did not involve all your people, nor did it address all your business processes. Same goes for CRM. CRM is not just marketing management, sales force automation, call center operations, etc.

The secret is to invest in the right technology. A technology isn’t something people use to record what they’ve done, but rather to do what they have to do. Ideally, the technology would be the foundation of their workspace. It would provide everyone in the organization a means whereby to execute all the processes associated with their jobs and have the artifacts resulting from their actions captured in the context of each and every business transaction. Let’s look a little deeper at the people and process dimensions of your business.

Securing Knowledge Capital

In today’s economy, your people are likely to be spread well beyond the traditional “four walls” of your company. In fact, some of the key people in the day-to-day operation of your business may not be “your” people at all. We are all increasingly dependent on our “value chain” of suppliers, business partners and, of course, customers. The technology you choose must address this demographic. And, these workers are now primarily “knowledge workers” with many different roles in your day-to-day operations. Again, the chosen technology must be able to accommodate these roles and secure your most valuable corporate resource—knowledge capital.

On the process side, because of the numbers and demographics of the people involved, your business transactions are likely to be more complicated than in the past. And because so many people outside the organization are critical to its success, the timeliness of them executing their responsibilities in your processes is paramount. Knowledge management has gone “real time.” The challenge is to enable your people to take the right actions at the right time based on the best available information to support those actions.

The right technology will do just that and these are some of the critical dimensions of that technology:

• A secure, role-based collaborative environment in which everyone in the organization can work and where the results of their activities are recorded once but accessible from many contexts
• Web-based, to allow ubiquitous access—anytime, anywhere—to meet the “real time” demands of our value chain based economy
• Have a flexible, configurable process management engine that will facilitate and standardize all of your business processes, but not necessitate re-engineering them to fit the technology
• Provide content management of your corporate knowledge—both policy and procedural guidance as well as the artifacts resulting from business transactions.

The perfect technology might be a mythical holy grail. But some, like Exact Software and its e-Synergy product, are further along in the quest to find the grail than others. e-Synergy is a technology that takes you beyond ERP, beyond CRM, out of the soup and onto solid ground.

Diving Association Goes to New Depths of Knowledge Integration

PADI America, in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, is part of PADI Worldwide, which includes seven service offices around the globe. PADI develops programs that encourage and fulfill the public interest in recreational scuba and snorkel diving worldwide. With 100,000 professional members operating in 175 countries and territories, PADI instructors are the most ethnically, culturally and racially diverse group of dive educators in the world.

Managing Customer Contact

In early 2002, Sharon Dill, vice president of information technology for PADI Worldwide, began looking for a way to tie all the departments of the company together. “Our dive center, sales department and training and education group all talk with our customers,” Dill says. “As a result, we might have three conversations going on in isolation. We didn’t have a way to keep track of those conversations.”

PADI began considering customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, and through an existing relationship with Exact Software, considered Exact’s e-Synergy product. The company began implementation of e-Synergy in mid-2002.

Throughout the course of the implementation, Dill found mixed levels of acceptance. “As with anything new, employees are wondering ‘What’s in it for me?’” she explains. “Many employees have created isolated Excel files or other methods to do their jobs. They need to understand that everyone can access customer notes if they begin entering data into e-Synergy. Some departments have really taken off.”

In the future, Dill hopes to give PADI Americas’ members access to e-Synergy through the web so they can access frequently asked questions (FAQ) files, check their own order information and, eventually, place orders. Dill also plans on moving the company’s overseas locations onto e-Synergy within the next several years.

Powerful Info Integration

Dill plans to upgrade PADI’s enterprise resource planning software, Macola Progression, to Exact’s Macola ES product. “Right now, we have a membership database, a Macola database and an XML tool that updates the e-Synergy database,” Dill says. “Once the upgrade and integration is complete, we’ll have our membership information, Macola ES and e-Synergy sharing the same database—that will be powerful! Our employees will have more confidence in the system; they will know they are looking at accurate, up-to-date customer information.”

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E-business and traditional ERP solutions

Exact is a leading manufacturer of software for accounting, human resource management (HRM), customer relationship management (CRM,) e-business and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Since its establishment in 1984, Exact has developed into one of the world’s premier companies delivering business software solutions to medium-sized organizations. Exact software is now used in 126 countries and available in 26 languages.

For many years, Exact has specialized in developing traditional back-office products such as payroll, accounting and logistics software packages. Over the past two years, our innovative Research & Development team has developed complete ready-to-go e-business solutions that integrate seamlessly with the back-office products. e-Synergy and Exact Globe 2000 are prime examples. e-Synergy from Exact Software is a business process management solution that provides employees, customers, vendors and partners with a real-time view of activity across an entire organization. For more information on e-Synergy, call 1-888-877-5126, x446, email esynergyna@exactsoftware.com or visit us on the web at:Exact Software North America