Putting Customers at the Center
Continued
PeopleSoft CRM also has a significant impact on one of the IT department's biggest customers, the sales staff. "It really improved communication between sales staff, client services, and payroll operations," says Gelfand. "We've heard very good comments from them about how it improved their handling of sales strategies and how it unified them into a single consolidated process, even among a very diverse group of salespeople. When you try to map out the stages of our sales process and create a single universal workflow, it's almost impossible, because every single salesperson from the entertainment industry works in a very different way. In Hollywood, it's all about the handshake, about relationships and who you know. With PeopleSoft CRM, everything about the customer, as well as potential clients, is right there in front of whoever needs to see it. It brings the sales staff together, as one team."
"As a company, we wanted to move on from 'What can we offer?' to 'What do our customers really need?'" adds Tulika Sahoo, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems manager for Axium International. "Customer information was scattered and dependent on individuals who interacted directly with customers on many levels, and there was no central location where all the information was gathered, processed, and available for review. With the implementation of PeopleSoft CRM, we get a 360-degree view of customers. The product scalability and Web access of PeopleSoft—important because our user base is all over the world—make it a very reliable tool for our company."
Capital Considerations
Implementing a solution that facilitates customer centricity doesn't have to break the bank or require a significant commitment of resources. Axium International took a shared services approach to implementing its PeopleSoft products, spreading the cost over Axium Entertainment and its sister company, ECG (Ensemble Chimes Global), a global payroll and contingent staffing firm. "Traditionally, ERP implementation teams are large, but we're very limited in terms of resources," says Gelfand. "We accomplished a lot with a small team. The entire implementation was completed with only three resources, including Tulika Sahoo, who is largely responsible for the project's success."
For Dan Israel at Revolution Health, capital considerations were a factor in his selection of a CRM application. "Oracle was sensitive to our need to not make a serious capital investment in new technology," he says. "The ability to pay for Oracle CRM On Demand as a subscription really helps us to manage cash flow. Oracle's reputation for secure databases and applications was a big selling point for us, too. The amount of money they've invested in making sure there are no breaches is going to be hundreds if not thousands of times over what we could budget for security with our own applications."
Room for growth also influenced Israel's choice of technology. "In the best of all possible worlds, the [Oracle] CRM On Demand application will continue to innovate, and advances in that product will stay ahead of our requirements," says Israel. "But if they don't, there's definitely comfort in knowing there's an upgrade path—that we could move from on demand to on premise and not have to switch vendors and start over."
Oracle's on-demand applications are hosted on Oracle servers, eliminating the need for costly IT infrastructure and making it possible to function with minimal staff. At Madacy, running Oracle E-Business Suite On Demand has cut IT hosting costs by half. "We've never had any trouble getting the attention we deserve on service and having an open line to call whomever we needed at Oracle if there was anything we needed to talk about strategically or any service issues that we might have," says Madacy's Fodi. "It's seamless to us because Oracle treats everybody on a level playing field no matter what your size."
For More Information
Oracle for Midsize Companies
Oracle Customer Relationship Management
Molly Rose Teuke is a freelance writer specializing in technology and business topics.
