In today’s networked world, you can no
longer regard your business processes and the
software that supports them as isolated entities.
The ability to integrate people, information,
and processes across your business ecosystem is
now an indispensable feature for any business
application.
A truly successful customer relationship management
(CRM) strategy demands precisely this level of
integration, for the simple reason that managing
a customer interaction does not stop at just capturing
an order. Linking customer-facing sales and service
applications with back-office processes in your
financials and supply chain management systems
is just the start; channel partners and resellers
need to be folded into the process as well. With
traditional CRM frontend tools, integration issues
will arise at almost every customer touch point,
whenever you need to:
- Capture complete, consistent views of
customer-related processes across systems — from
inquiries and order capture to fulfillment,
delivery, and cash collections
- Provide up-to-date customer data to your
mobile sales and service team as well as
your service representatives
- Adapt and update cross-application processes
that can change as quickly as your product
offerings, customers, and partners
- Provide customer access to your products
and services through appropriate channels
using the right technology
- Accurately handle orders across multiple
fulfillment systems — even those of
your own vendors or partners
- Manage various customer and product documents — from
orders and invoices to product specs and
sales forecasts — for ready distribution
among customers, colleagues, resellers, and
partner channels
To respond to challenges like these, you need
the right combination of technology and solutions.
Attaining this level of integration can be expensive,
considering the resources that can go into maintaining
connections or linking up to outside platform
products. Only by having integration built in
from the start can you reduce the total cost of
a CRM implementation.
mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP
CRM) and SAP NetWeaver1 — SAP’s
open, extensive application and integration platform — offer
this combination of full-featured solutions and
integration technology. mySAP CRM is among the
first SAP solutions to be developed based on SAP
NetWeaver. When you install this CRM solution,
you are automatically tied into the portal, collaboration,
business intelligence, and master data management
functionality available from SAP NetWeaver. Figure
1 provides a glimpse of some of the mySAP
CRM features that SAP NetWeaver supports.
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Figure
1 |
mySAP CRM Features Enabled
by SAP NetWeaver |
Together, mySAP CRM and SAP NetWeaver form a
complete customer relationship management solution,
with no need for additional integration products.
This solution brings openness and flexibility
to your user channels, a highly intuitive user
interface, powerful information management capabilities,
and the built-in ability to integrate outside
software and partners into your processes. SAP
NetWeaver is also responsible for a lower TCO
by providing tools and resources for full support
throughout the entire software life cycle, from
implementation, to daily operation, to software
configuration and enhancements.
Here are just four areas where SAP NetWeaver
is working behind the scenes to put mySAP CRM
on the leading edge of end-to-end, customer-centric
business processes:
User
Interaction
Because of the vast number and types of customer-oriented
activities in a company, a “CRM user” could
refer to a customer, a partner, an entry-level
employee, or a highly trained specialist. To engage
them all, and with minimal training and maximum
convenience, mySAP CRM user interfaces were specifically
designed for easy navigation and a consistent
look and feel (see the example in Figure
2).
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Figure
2 |
Page Layout of the People-Centric
User Interface of mySAP CRM |
What does this mean for users? SAP created a
people-centric UI specifically for ease of use,
based on reusable interaction patterns and SAP
Enterprise Portal technology.2 In
the people-centric UI of mySAP CRM, users can
be assigned roles tailored to a particular task
or to industry-specific demands, and will encounter
only a limited number of screen templates across
all the systems they need (see Figure
3). So a service representative will
already have a good feel for how to navigate and
extract information from a screen built to access
contract information from a sales system.
 |
Figure
3 |
Common Look and Feel Across
Different mySAP CRM Applications |
mySAP CRM’s openness at the user interaction
level means that users can access customer information
from desktop PCs, mobile laptops, handheld devices,
and tablet PCs (see Figure 4),
and that they can choose from such diverse technical
interaction channels as telephone, fax, email,
pager, short message service (SMS), and voice
over IP (VoIP).
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Figure
4 |
A Sample mySAP CRM System
Landscape |
Those in IT will also appreciate the clear separation
in mySAP CRM between the user interface and the
business logic, and that communication between
the two layers relies on a generic service interface.
In other words, user interface development is
streamlined, and certain interface components
can easily be regrouped, reused, or redesigned.
This approach, along with the reliance on open
standards and a small set of reusable UI elements,
conforms to Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) — a
blueprint for reusing your current application
functions and making them available to a broader
audience inside or outside your enterprise.
Information
Management
With any CRM strategy, a looming question is
how to ensure access to the range of document
types and sources that hold customer-focused data.
Users of mySAP CRM will need access to both structured
and unstructured data. mySAP CRM offers a number
of features for providing information to users
at their desks and on the road. For instance,
in the office, users can access unstructured marketing
data through the Info Center, which provides knowledge
management features based on SAP EP. And when
a call comes into your Interaction Center, the
Solution Database will immediately give agents
the backend information they need as they speak
with customers. For mobile users, the third-party
tool BackWeb is incorporated into the mySAP CRM
solution to ensure that all the unstructured information
available to online users also reaches users’ mobile
services.
Extensive analytical options for reports and
performance measures of your CRM activities3 are
also available from mySAP CRM applications due
to the close integration with SAP Business Information
Warehouse (part of SAP NetWeaver). mySAP CRM and
SAP NetWeaver also provide common administration
of master data across system boundaries, enabling
the smooth operation of mySAP CRM with multiple,
heterogeneous backend systems.
Process
Integration
mySAP CRM supports a variety of integration
scenarios designed to support greater responsiveness
to customers, including:
- Built-in process integration, spanning
not only mySAP CRM but also applications,
for instance, from mySAP ERP and mySAP SCM
- Collaborative, cross-company business
processes such as Channel Management for
collaboration with business partners, or
Extended Order Management for distributed
processing of customer orders across all
your fulfillment systems inside and outside
the company
- Built-in groupware integration, which
enables the bidirectional exchange of activities
and contact information between mySAP CRM
and Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes
- Complete workflow support using high-performance
tools, such as the Workflow Modeler4 and
predefined workflow processes
Process integration is key for a successful
CRM implementation. This means, for instance,
linking your campaign management processes to
mySAP SCM to make sure a trade promotion not only
leads to higher orders, but also ensures that
stock is available and can be delivered in time!
Or if you supply customers with products from
various manufacturers, mySAP CRM allows you to
integrate the various fulfillment systems of your
suppliers — whether they’re SAP systems
or not. These are just two examples of what direct process
integration brings to your CRM strategy.
Why Should
Your Solutions Follow the Enterprise
Services Architecture (ESA) Blueprint?
Enterprise Services Architecture
(ESA) is a generic model for a system
architecture that will readily support
service-oriented applications. ESA
is designed to make cross-component
application development more cost effective
by improving speed and flexibility
in the development, adaptation, and
customer-specific configuration of
user interfaces. The new, portal-based
user interface of mySAP CRM has been
developed according to this model.
Using Enterprise Services Architecture,
you need not develop each and every
innovative application from scratch.
Instead, existing application services
from quality-assured components can
be made available as Web services,
used as the basis for specific user
interfaces, or integrated into completely
new applications. mySAP CRM supports
open Web services based on Web standards
as well as RosettaNet as a semantic
standard for the exchange of business
objects.
By following the ESA blueprint in
your own solution landscape, you can
simplify the development of cross-functional,
process-oriented applications that
exceed the capabilities of conventional
transaction processing based on relational
databases. These applications include
functions such as team collaboration,
content management, and business analytics.
For more on how SAP supports ESA,
see www.sap.com/netweaver. |
Application
Platform and Life-Cycle Management
NetWeaver runs on two technology stacks, capitalizing
on the strengths that Java and ABAP each bring
to application development. Similarly, in mySAP
CRM, Java is the implementation platform for handheld
and Internet (pricing, configuration, and e-commerce)
applications, while ABAP is the basis for the
core processes in mySAP CRM.
SAP customers will appreciate the ability to
deploy mySAP CRM processes and functions gradually,
in manageable, incremental steps based on specific
business needs. This is achieved by the tight
integration between mySAP CRM and the services
of SAP Solution Manager, where mySAP CRM business
processes are documented for smooth implementation
and configuration.5 By
reducing your implementation time and optimizing
the use of your IT infrastructure, SAP Solution
Manager enhances the ROI for your mySAP CRM solution.
Conclusion
With SAP NetWeaver technology at work, mySAP
CRM offers a leading-edge solution that brings
complete backend integration to frontend customer-facing
processes. The benefits for mySAP CRM customers
are clear: SAP NetWeaver, with its comprehensive
integration capabilities across all application
levels (people, information, and processes), helps
reduce the total cost of mySAP CRM implementation
and operation. Project teams don’t first
have to spend precious resources integrating outside
platform products. In addition, SAP NetWeaver
provides SAP Solution Manager for implementing,
operating, and monitoring all customer-focused
processes, applications, and systems.
For more information on SAP NetWeaver, see www.sap.com/netweaver.
For further details on the technology and business
processes behind mySAP CRM, see www.sap.com/crm and
the upcoming SAP PRESS book mySAP CRM — Customer-Focused
Business Processes with SAP CRM 4.0, edited
by Rüdiger Buck-Emden and Peter Zencke.
1 SAP
NetWeaver includes SAP Business Information
Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP Enterprise Portal
(SAP EP), and SAP Web Application Server
(SAP Web AS), among other components and
solutions. For more background on NetWeaver,
see the article by Franz-Josef Fritz in this
issue of SAP Insider.
2 For
more on the SAP Enterprise Portal, see the
July 2003 issue of SAP Insider.
3 See
Christopher Eldredge's article "Don't Forget
Analytics When Managing Customer Relationships" in
this issue of SAP Insider (www.SAPinsider.com)
for more on analytics for mySAP CRM.
4 For
more on the Workflow Modeler, see "Role-Managed
Modeling of Business Processes" by Alan Rickayzen
in this issue of SAP Insider (www.SAPinsider.com).
5 For
more on SAP Solution Manager, see "Focus
on Your Customers More Effectively and Cost-Efficiently
with CRM Business Scenarios and SAP Solution
Manager" by Hans-Heinrich Siemers and Andreas
Schuh in this issue of SAP Insider (www.SAPinsider.com).
With
SAP since 1990, Dr. Rüdiger
Buck-Emden has held different
management positions in the areas of development,
product management, and strategic planning.
Currently, he is the Vice President of
CRM Architecture & Technology. Before
joining SAP, Dr. Rüdiger Buck-Emden
was development manager at Nixdorf Computer
AG’s Business Systems unit. He studied
industrial engineering, graduated in computer
science and obtained a doctorate in the
area of computer-based information systems.
Dr. Rüdiger Buck-Emden has been the
author and co-author of several books and
numerous articles. |
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