Integrating ERP can overcome CRM limits

Software Magazine, Spring, 2002 by Alan Robert Earls

One new approach, from Trigo Technologies, is to bridge the gap between the ERP and CRM systems with a product information repository, aimed in particular at the retail and manufacturing industries. The product aims to manage the fine-grained attributes of product lifecycles contained within SKU codes, such as regions, pricing and units of measure. This helps to streamline communication about project inventory, shipping and other information surrounding products of the customer. "Customers have a big gap in the area of product information," said Thomas Reilly, Trigo's CEO. "They want to see consistent information about their products across CRM, ERP, content management and other systems."

Another promising trend is the emergence of Web services standards. As an integration medium, Web services standards of XML, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), UDDI for directory services and WSDL for marshalling the needed components, hold great promise for lowering the cost of application integration. But activity is in an early stage so reports on their impact are few today on Web services as an integration method for existing systems.

However some of the news "from the front" of implementation is encouraging: vendors are steadily building more capability into their products; integrators say they are accumulating a track record for successfully stitching together legacy systems and the newest CRM applications, and customers in a range of industries say they are happy with the end results.

Meriwest Credit Union Links Siebel to Financials

In the world of financial services, for example, Meriwest Credit Union, which has grown into one of Silicon Valley's largest institutions, has made a leap into the integrated world. Facing its need to enhance customer-facing capabilities, Meriwest chose the Chicago-based consulting firm Inforte to implement Siebel's eBusiness Applications solution. Their selection was based on Inforte's project delivery capability and a strong endorsement for Siebel itself. (Inforte had implemented more than 100 Siebel solutions.) For Meriwest, Inforte integrated the Siebel CRM solution with Meriwest's core financial system, which handled functions such as financial processing, credit transactions and fraud-checking capabilities. Dave Puett, vice president of e-marketing solutions at Meriwest, explains that his organization "did a lot of research" starting in the mid-1990s to come up with the requirements documents for its CRM solution. "We knew we needed to know more about our members and we also needed to hold down costs," he explains.

Among other things, Meriwest wanted to better manage marketing functions, campaign management, lead generation and tracking, and they wanted to enhance cross-selling opportunities. Puett said he was also bolting for the ability to accelerate service requests so that if someone was promised something and it wasn't completed, the software would continue to accelerate the request upward.

Puett said Meriwest's laundry list of "must have" features was so long that it took the vendor market until 1999 to "catch up" making it possible for his team to actually begin an RFP process.