A Cygnet Infotech Whitepaper The Future of CRM A Closer Look At Why Companies Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM To Drive Revenue and Accelerate The Creation of Line-of-Business Applications. 1
1 INTRODUCTION For businesses across the world, the proliferation of software to manage business processes and functions has been a blessing as well as a curse for both large & small businesses. In this volatile economic environment, many organizations are asking themselves what kind of strategies they can follow to bring tangible business benefits while coping with the current economic conditions. In dire economic situations, businesses or organizations typically work hard to expand their customer base and spend hefty money to add solid fuel to their growth engine. While there is no magic pill or solution for an effective growth, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can provide a base to the organizations to survive and succeed in this uncertain situation. Here re the problems!!! From more than 10 years, companies or enterprises have embraced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software as one of the best tools to manage sales, services and marketing. With the help of various solutions like Microsoft Dynamics CRM can now track their interactions, prospective clients and leads, identify immense business opportunities, tackle client support issues, and much more. IT organizations needed to support all the applications developed by different vendors, on different platforms and hardware. Critical business data was duplicated in every application with no means of integration. With increasing number of departments, keeping each of these applications updated with the most recent information became a huge problem for businesses. Due to limited extensibility, performance has become a major issue. Interoperability due to limited functionality and proprietary language & data. Version locking Now, xrm an improved version of CRM is creating buzz across the world. In this white paper, we will try to understand what xrm is and explore the potential of this amazing platform that accelerate the creation of various LOB (Line-of-business) applications. We will also try to find out the different ways in which the xrm framework extends the functionality of the conventional CRM application and takes it beyond the realm of sales, marketing and customer service. 2
2 UNDERSTANDING xrm Many customers or organizations benefit from xrm by creating many different and innovative LOB applications: Real Estate Development Vendor Management Trade Management Property Management Contractor Management Recruit Management Dealer Management Agriculture Management Citizen Management Hospital Management Agent Management & More... One Platform, Many Applications You can think of it as the natural evolution of conventional CRM. The only difference is that while the C is equal to customer, client or contact in CRM, in this case the X stands for anything or any relationship that needs to be managed, such as vendors, prospects, dealers, employees as well as any type of business relationships like properties, assets, projects, legislation, grants and more. xrm is nothing but a concept of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to create business applications that manage various other things apart from customers. It is a business application platform layer that is designed to boost up the creation of enterprise-class relation business applications by offering IT professionals with reusable application services that can be easily and rapidly adapted to cater unique needs & deeds of the users and business through point & click. xrm Sharpens Your Competitive Edge... Core xrm Components User Interface Database Engine - SQL Server Reporting Engine Work Flow Engine Companies or organizations that respond to market pressures and opportunities effectively and more importantly quickly can easily gain a competitive edge. This is the reason why a technology framework or platform that offers rapid development of new technology tools is very crucial. And that s the beauty of xrm! The xrm is a flexible development platform that takes advantage of Microsoft Dynamics framework to accomplish tasks that would in general requires highly skilled IT professionals, time, money and resources. With its pre-built functionality, dynamic services, rapid customization and four core components shown in figure, you can leverage from your existing investment in Dynamics CRM to rapidly build other business applications required within your organization to extend your business process. What Makes xrm Different? With a combination of prebuilt and configurable functionality and a highly flexible, service-oriented architecture xrm framework support various concurrent applications and enable rapid changes whenever business requires any change. Here s a closer look at a few things that makes xrm different from the rest of the application frameworks: 3
Integrates perfectly and smoothly with enterprise systems. For businesses or enterprises with various business applications, standardizing different applications on the xrm platform can easily cut-down the development, integration, system administration and overall management costs. Moreover, the xrm framework can be easily connected with existing IT investments through a wide range of standard approaches. Saves IT resources and time while focusing on high-value tasks. For certain critical and complex requests, IT can easily use xrm platform to boost up the solution delivery while saving significant amount of time. You don t need to hire external consultants or professionals as you can easily make modifications quickly and on a predictable schedule. Nurture consistent user performance and client experience. Customizable and flexible workflows within the xrm framework make sure that everyone within the organization or enterprise follows the standard process, which at the end improve productivity, workflows and client insights. Simplified environment. The architecture of the xrm offers the high level of scalability and availability at the much lower price by providing either on-premises or online services to the enterprises or firms willing to leverage from hosted and cloud-based computing options. Better ROI through high adoption. It can be easily integrated with other Microsoft Office products or applications as well as supports web-based and mobile user experiences. The applications based on the xrm need minimal training and become just an extension of other known desktop applications. Offers rapid innovation through point and click customization and drag n drop design. Even non-technical users can now make changes and rapidly provide new innovative capabilities as per their business requirements and client expectations. It is very easy to quickly update screen layouts or to create ad hoc reports to enhance and optimize service delivery. 4
3 CRM to xrm Transitioning to Relationship-Oriented Applications Now as we know what xrm is and how it is different from others, let s try to find out how xrm helps to improve the conventional CRM functionality. Each and every organization or enterprise operates and manages their business in a different manner. Most of the conventional CRM functionalities work for 90% of their process, but still 10% needs to be customized. Dynamics CRM offers core functionalities for managing the sales cycle from lead to order, creating marketing lists and delivering fully-featured campaigns while providing complete customer service with cases and full-service scheduling functionality. In other way, the xrm is transition from conventional customer relationship solutions to relationship-oriented applications, where the C for customer is replaced by the X for any relationship. Let s put in another way: Where CRM is used by or supports sales, marketing and customer service teams, the xrm can be used by or support any team within your organization. Where CRM manages customer relationships, the xrm can manage ANY Relationship. Where CRM automates marketing, sales & service business process, the xrm automate any business process. Where CRM tracks interactions, activities, tasks or custom history, the xrm can do the same things for anything or for X. Where CRM provides customer centric analytics, the xrm can provide X -centric analysis. What xrm Can Do For Your Company? The best way to showcase xrm s potential is through an example. In this section, we will go through the case study that describe about an Automated Order Management System using CRM/xRM Solution. However, the company name is withheld due to privacy issues, but the case study shows the versatility of the xrm platform. 5
Company Profile: The company is one of the world s largest manufacturers of reliable windows and doors. They provide extensive product offering encompassing windows, exterior doors, interior doors and related building products that are sold globally through multiple distribution channels including retail home centres, wholesale distributors and building product retailers. Business Situation: The client gets information from retailers and distributes the orders accordingly. The organization has recognized a need to centralize and automate the sales operation and replace the existing manual and semi-automated CRM solutions within the organization for better communication and collaboration between customer orders, service department and suppliers in geographically dispersed locations. Solution: After evaluating the market for order management systems, the company has selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a single platform to replace existing manual and semi-automated CRM functions in organization. The company executives had worked closely with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM experts and consultants throughout the process to discuss how the solution would fulfil their unique requirements like: Benefits: A single, centralized application for order tracking, customer retention, central repository of orders for sales manager. Ease of managing customer surveys and issues, VOC dashboard for Customer Service Report Department. Record of appointments, Retailer updates on so on for retailers and IHC users. Trip costs, order costs, DSM performance and so on for finance department. Portal for Manufacturer & Installer. Activity tracking of in home consultants and installers Features like Cycle Time, Non one Trip reports. Automate Order updates to retail giant for retailer. Migration from legacy system. Gained better business control through full adoption of xrm platform. Greater tracking and accounting ability to service the request. Simplified interface to boost up user adoption. Highly scalable feature set Reduced development cost by almost 50%. Making sense of xrm: Is it really the future of CRM? Drive Efficient and Effective IT It basically streamlines your IT operations using a common line-of-business application platform, which enables you to leverage and maximize your existing IT resources. One platform, many applications Leverage from existing shared resources and infrastructure Boost up the efficiency of IT 6
Accelerate the Development The xrm framework accelerates the development of different LOB applications on the same platform through shared resources. Build the Right Business Applications With its flexible and scalable application services, it is very easy and quick process to define LOB business applications to fulfil a wide range of business needs. Fulfil specialized business requirements Speed up the end user adoption Enhance business insight and visibility Deliver Rapid Innovation and Agility Offer rapid innovative business applications & solutions focused on strategic objectives and quickly respond to the rapidly changing needs of the business. Match up with ever changing business requirements Focus on strategic objectives Empower your business through innovation and agility Multiple Applications Help your business get a competitive edge and achieve long-term success by delivering complete business solutions that fulfil strategic requirements and can be changed or updated whenever needed. Consistent User Experience Minimize the training time and costs by providing users a consistent and familiar user interface based on other Microsoft Office applications and provide easily access to the LOB applications anywhere using a web browser or mobile device. 7
Dynamic Application Services Cut down the time and cost to deliver and update applications using point-and-click application customizations. Dynamic services automatically spread customizations through the data model, which at the end save time and making it easy to make any changes to the application whenever business requires. xrm offers dynamic application services to deliver feature-rich LOB application development platform, which quickly adjusts to meet your ever-changing business application requirements. The xrm offers core functionalities across different applications through the dynamic application services which are: Reusable across the multiple applications Prebuilt to help you avoid reinventing the wheel. Flexible to support unique and ever changing business needs. Scalable for enterprise-level deployments. Is xrm your future? As we ve seen in the case study, the xrm can be highly versatile tool for managing any kind of business task that needs tracking or monitoring. The xrm can be easily configured to fulfil your critical business needs, and has a lot more to offer. An xrm solution created on Microsoft Dynamics CRM is efficient, powerful and functional. With immense in-built functionalities and familiar interfaces, xrm is clearly the future of CRM! About Cygnet Infotech Cygnet Infotech is a software services and solutions provider with clients in over 22 countries. Cygnet specializes in Dynamics CRM implementations and customizations. To know more about Cygnet, visit www.cygnet-infotech.com 8