104917 Resource 102302 102466 102466 1129206937580 1129206937580 Controlled No Integration at the point of attack?

How can a business go to market with no integration between the sales force and operations?

<p>I see this all the time and it amazes me. How can a&nbsp;company go to market with two systems and a gap right in most critical juncture of their business? A CRM solution where we monitor and process sales activity is great. A operations system where we process orders and perform accounting, manage inventory and&nbsp;production, etc., also is great. But how can there be no integration between the two? Isn't the sales process really from lead to cash? From first interest to fulfillment? How can companies hit their potential when this crucial process is broken in the middle?</p><p>The sad answer is that they can't. This explains the 100s, or even 1000s, of hours the company spends on spreadsheets trying to bridge the gap, gain understanding on both sides of the chasm. Or, even worse, the gap explains the great sales months that are unprofitable.&nbsp; No matter the size of the company, whether we are doing Oracle or NetSuite implementations, we have seen companies contort themselves a thousand different ways to try to make up for the fact that, when they look at the business,&nbsp;their revenues and costs are never in the same picture, unless they are looking at historical - read General Ledger - data. 8 days after the period closes, what action can you take?</p><p>The gap between sales and operations also explains the wasted and duplicate effort that's performed by the folks in the front office. The gap also explains the constant tension between sales and operations, each&nbsp; blaming the other for the problems that arise from the gap, or worse, the business that falls into the gap, never to be seen again. </p><p>Integration is an oft used term in Information Technology, but sometimes you wonder just what people understand by it. Our definition is pretty simple:&nbsp;A system with one customer table, around which all processes flow, is integrated. A system with two customer tables that cannot communicate successfully is, well, two systems with a big gap, and all manner of clever coding is probably not going to close it. </p><p>If you want to understand the value of CRM, then I would suggest that you start by taking a look at how you handle&nbsp;a customer order. You'll start to see the value when you start to understand the need for an integrated process, on an integrated system. Remember, first interest to fulfillment, that's customer relationship management.</p> 10 application/xml false crm customer relationship management integrated system netsuite implementation order management Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; YPC 3.0.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 68.79.94.201 68.79.94.201 tfoydel false true false false true 205861 false false true false false false true 102302 blog blogsite/SightLines/web