Examination Of A Crm

Prepare a research paper that examines a customer relationship management (CRM) system implementation by and organisation.

Description of Case / Background of Company

Founded in 1977, Indigo was first in the market to introduce a top вЂ" quality digital printing press and remains a leading innovator in the digital printing industry. Indigo was acquired by the Hewlett вЂ" Packard Company in March of 2002 and now operates as the Indigo Digital Press Division within Hewlett вЂ" Packard. The CRM implementation described in the case study took place in the years prior to Indigo’s acquisition by HP, and the overview reflects this. Indigo is a global company and employs 150 sales representatives in charge of direct sales, and it has a network of distributors. Indigo designs and produces high quality digital printing presses and distributes them throughout Europe and America. In addition to these products, indigo markets proprietary ink, thus providing solutions for commercial print shops. Indigo also sells industrial applications like packaging, plastic cards and labels. Indigo sells to customers in over forty countries, including commercial printers, quick вЂ" printers, in вЂ" plants, packaging plants and labels printers.

Initiation

To support its manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain operations, Indigo had successfully implemented an application capable of looking after this function. This application however, was not capable of supporting the sales and marketing functions of Indigo.

In early 1998, Indigo’s management became concerned with the effectiveness and productivity of its sales force and faced a number of business challenges including:

1. The long period of time taken to close sales. In the absence of the capability to analyse the sales process and to identify its bottlenecks, It was realised to be impossible to shorten the very long sales cycle and close sales faster.

2. Remoteness from sales force. Due to the geographical nature of the spread out sales force, sales managers found it difficult to gain a clear visibility regarding the subordinates and whether they were spending their time wisely and focused on the right prospects.

3. Low productivity of sales representatives. Due to the fact that many of the sales representatives spent too much time gathering information from the front office, Indigo realised it needed to provide its sales force with relevant data and tools to help them focus on being able to sell the product.

4. Training and orientation of new sales staff too long. Indigo’s expansion into new markets saw the appointment of many new recruits, with their training and orientation taking as long as several months. Indigo had no way of being capable of transferring account history and information about leads to the new sales representatives quickly.

5. Poorly maintained forecasts. Sales representatives maintained their forecasts on spreadsheets and hand-written notes. These forecasts were then collected by the manager either by phone or email, then compiled into a consolidated list and communicated to higher levels of management. As a result of this, keeping track of sales and leads and accurately forecasting sales was extremely difficult.

It is these business challenges that lead top management in Indigo to conclude that they needed an automated tool to increase sale force effectiveness and productivity, streamline marketing and sales process and improve the tracking of new leads.

How Project Was Initiated

At the time of implementation, there were a variety of CRM systems available to Indigo. For the evaluation process, a small vendor selection task force was established to select the optimal CRM solution.

The task force began its mission by considering the lotus-notes application, which was the least expensive option since indigo already paid for the software purchased two years earlier but still needed heavy customisation to fit with indigo’s needs.

The vendor task force had become aware that market studies from Gartner group and Forrester research rated Siebel not only to be the undisputed market leader, but also to be financially stronger than its competitors. The task force had found Siebel, relative to its competitors, comparable software licence costs, stronger support for sales functions and richer user interface.

Moreover, due to the fact that the last system at indigo needed / required customisation, the Siebel application was seen as a good fit with the needs of indigo and was another relative advantage.

The evaluation process was quick, and Siebel was determined to be the stronger and more adaptable CRM system to Indigo’s needs because of its full blown functionality, out of the box, and its intuitive user interface.

Next Step

A steering committee was set up, which included senior managers from the sales, marketing and IT departments (Figure 4) (inset diagram). In addition, Director of marketing in Europe became the project leader and Ronnie Ben-Zion became the IT project manager and IT analyst for the CRM application. Two marketing professionals, one in the US and the other in Europe, took charge of the help-desk and training activities at their respective locations and Indigo hired a database administrator to administer the CRM database.

Finally, a technical account manager from Siebel helped the team with the deployment of Siebel’s Rapid Application Deployment (RAD) methodology.

Was to be finished within 3 вЂ" 6 months.

Indigo’s US president insisted on keeping the CRM system simple and is message to the project team was “take us from boston to providence, not to the moon and back”.

Project team kept the Siebel application simple and easy to use due to top-management guidance and they attributed the failure to implement the lotus notes application to the fact that sales representatives found it too complex and confusing. By keeping the current CRM application easy and simple, they are hoping to achieve results fast and gain user buy in. Also aspired to manage change effectively, even for users who seemed unhappy to share information, weren’t computer savvy, or not foresee the CRM benefits.

To keep the implementation project within the budget and time limits and to reduce implementation risk, the project team opted for out of the box functionality and minimized customisation. By minimising customisation, they also hoped to increase manageability of maintenance and to lower future