Day 2 - Lesson Learned - Seçil Akdemir

In order to mitigate going concern risk of small ERP vendors, firms can make long term contracts with expert people from the vendor. Another method could be developing an in-house expert.

ERP system do not solve single data problems by themselves, you still need communication between departments in order to benefit from this feature of ERP systems.

CRM is a company wide business strategy which is developed to increase profitability with increased consumer loyalty while decreasing costs.

There are 3 types of CRM companies which are Enterprise CRM, Mid Market CRM and On Demand CRM and major players in CRM business are Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft and Salesforce.Com.

Siebel is the CRM application of Oracle Company and it is the only enterprise CRM in the market. It has certain advantages over others so it has the highest market share. Siebel is said to be easy to implement, administrate and maintain and user friendly.

Siebel also have different applications which are CRM Enterprise, CRM Professional Edition and CRM On Demand. Siebel has also different industry specific applications for consumer goods, finance, energy, media, clinic and etc.

Siebel also have different employee, partner, customer and mobile application types.
There are 5 types of Siebel Clients which can be listed as Siebel Web Client, Siebel Handheld Client, Siebel Wireless Web Client, Siebel Mobile Web Client, and Siebel Dedicated Web Client.

There could be lots of different reasons for a company in order to decide on implementing ERP and the most important one is the increasing automation and control over firm and data integrity. Moreover, ERP system could be useful in terms of increasing efficiency, sharing information among departments and competitiveness. Another important purpose is generally the accounting needs of the company. With the help of ERP systems, accounting systems will become more integrated to other operations therefore, number of errors in the system will probably decrease.

However, on the other hand ERP systems are very expensive systems so firms should do cost vs. benefit analysis in detail before deciding on implementation. Companies should also consider their know-how, availability of their staff and time besides money. In case of some traditional companies, organization readiness could also create a problem for the implementation because if people resist on using the system the huge investment could mean nothing than a cost. Moreover, in some business processes ERP systems could affect the efficiency negatively because ERP systems demand so much information.

Therefore, as mentioned above before deciding on ERP implementation, companies should do detailed analysis such as SWOT analysis and GAP analysis. They have to think about the need for such a system for their long term organizational goals. So, firms should always begin with their business objectives to the analysis.

SWOT analysis is a brief presentation of a company’s internal strengths, weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. This analysis will certainly be useful in order to observe the current situation of a company.

In the case of GAP analysis, we begin with the current situation and then analyzed the future desired situation. After that we will decide on what we have to do in order to reach our target position.

Elevator speech is like an executive summary which will shortly and briefly present the improvement opportunities with the benefits. After that it should also mention the implementation plan and certainly the metrics such as KPIs.