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• Provide sales prospect and contact information, product information, product
configuration capabilities, and sales quote generation capabilities.
• Enable sales, marketing, and delivery departments to easily share customer and
Customer Service:
• Provide information and tools to make call centers, help desks, and customer
support staff more efficient.
Marketing:
• Support direct-marketing campaigns by providing capabilities for capturing
prospects and customer data, for providing product and service information for
qualifying leads for targeted marketing, and for scheduling and tracking direct-
Distinguish between operational and analytical CRM.
Operational CRM includes customer-facing applications such as tools for sales force
automation, call center and customer service support, and marketing automation.
Analytical CRM includes applications that analyze customer data generated by
4. What are the challenges posed by enterprise applications?
List and describe the challenges posed by enterprise applications.
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Enterprise applications are very difficult to implement successfully. They require
extensive organizational change, expensive new software investments, and careful
assessment of how these systems will enhance organizational performance. Enterprise
Explain how these challenges can be addressed.
Enterprise applications create new interconnections among myriad business processes
and data flows inside the firm (and in the case of supply chain management systems,
5. How are enterprise applications taking advantage of new technologies?
How are enterprise applications taking advantage of SOA, Web services, open
source software, and wireless technology?
Enterprise application vendors are delivering more value by developing systems that
are more flexible, Web-enabled, and capable of integration with other systems. Next-
generation enterprise applications include open source and on-demand solutions.
Define social CRM and explain how customer relationship managements
systems are using social networking.
Social CRM tools enable a business to connect customer conversations and
relationship from social networking sites to CRM processes rather than having them
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Discussion Questions
1. Supply chain management is less about managing the physical movement of
goods and more about managing information. Discuss the implications of this
statement.
The information obtained through a supply chain management system can be used to
make better decisions regarding purchasing, production, and logistics. Information
2. If a company wants to implement an enterprise application, it had better do its
homework. Discuss the implications of this statement.
Most students should agree that adopting an enterprise system is a key business
decision first and foremost. CEOs and top executives must lead the change in the
3. Which enterprise application should a business install first: ERP, SCM, or
CRM? Explain your answer.
Because each of these applications are so powerful in changing the way an organization
works implementation is an extreme challenge for any business. The decision about
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Section 9.5, “Hands–On MIS”
Management Decision Problems
1. Toronto-based Mercedes-Benz Canada: Fifty-five car dealers provided customer
data on an ad hoc basis. No real incentive for dealers to share information with the
company. How could customer relationship management (CRM) and partner
relationship management (PRM) systems help solve this problem?
Comprehensive CRM packages contain modules for partner relationship management
(PRM) and employee relationship management (ERM). PRM uses many of the same
data, tools, and systems as CRM to enhance collaboration between a company and its
2. Office Depot: The company tries to offer a wider range of office supplies at lower
costs than other retailers by using just-in-time replenishment and tight inventory
control systems. It uses information from a demand forecasting system and point-of-
sale data to replenish its inventory in its 1,600 retail stores. Explain how these
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SCM applications that would be especially helpful to Office Depot are:
• Demand planning: Determines how much product Office Depot needs to
have suppliers produce to satisfy all of its customers’ demands.
Improving Decision Making: Using Database Software to Manage Customer Service
Requests
Software skills: Database design; querying and reporting
Business skills: Customer service analysis
Achieving Operational Excellence: Evaluating Supply Chain Management Services
Software skills: Web browser and presentation software
Business skills: Evaluating supply chain management services
Trucking companies no longer merely carry goods from one place to another. Some
also provide supply chain management services to their customers and help them
manage their information. In this project you’ll use the Web to research and
evaluate two of these business services.
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Investigate the Web sites of two companies, J. B. Hunt (www.jbhunt.com) and
Schneider Logistics (www.schneiderlogistics.com), to see how these companies’
services can be used for supply chain management. Then, respond to the following
questions:
1. What supply chain processes can each of these companies support for their
clients?
J. B. Hunt
Schneider
better serving the customer.
Taken from the J. B. Hunt Web site:
J. B. Hunt has long been recognized as a
leader in providing transportation logistics
Taken from the Schneider Web site:
You have a set of logistic challenges.
Schneider Logistics has the solutions.
2. How can customers use the Web site of each company to help them with supply
chain management?
“At J.B. Hunt, we forge long-term partnerships with key customers that include
supply chain management as an integral part of their strategy. Working in concert, we
will drive out cost, add value and function as an extension of their enterprise.”
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At this site, customers can use the Web site to conduct business. There are a number
of modules that can be accessed, and they have made it very easy to use with a
number of supply chain demos including: Supplier Outbound, Distribution Center
3. Compare the supply chain management services provided by these companies.
Which company would you select to help your firm manage its supply chain?
Why?
Responses to the question will vary. Perhaps those who do not possess an in-depth
background with this type of technology will find the J. B. Hunt site relatively easy to
use. If they run into difficulties they can easily access one of the many tutorials and
Video Cases
You will find video cases illustrating some of the concepts in this chapter on the Laudon
Collaboration and Teamwork: Analyzing Enterprise Application Vendors
In MyMISLab you will find a Collaboration and Teamwork Project dealing with the
concepts in this chapter. You will be able to use Google Sites, Google Docs, and other
open-source collaboration tools to complete the assignment.
Case Study: Summit Electric Lights Up with a New ERP System
1. Which business processes are the most important at Summit Electric Supply?
Why?
Most importantly, Summit had to be able to rapidly handle a high volume of
transactions and swift inventory turnover. The old system was beginning to prevent
2. What problems did Summit have with its old systems? What was the business
impact of those problems?
One system was used for sales entries and purchase orders. A separate system was
used for back-end reporting. Integration between the two systems was done manually
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3. How did Summit’s ERP system improve operational efficiency and decision
making? Give several examples.
Summit used a “batch management” solution in SAP’s ERP materials management
software that treats a wire reel as a “batch” rather than as a single product. Every time
a customer buys a length of wire, the length can be entered into the system to track
4. Describe two ways in which Summit’s customers benefit from the new ERP
system.
To accommodate large customers with long-term job sites, Summit sets up temporary
warehouses on-site to supply these customers with its electrical products. Summit still
owns the inventory, but it’s dedicated to these customers and can’t be treated as
standard inventory in the ERP system. SAP’s ERP software didn’t support that way
5. Diagram Summit’s old and new process for handling chargebacks.
Old process:
Processing chargebacks required a great deal of manual work and often took months
to resolve.
• Employees review customer invoices for specific manufacturers to identify
which chargebacks Summit could claim.
New Process:
As part of its ERP solution, Summit implemented the SAP Paybacks and
Chargebacks application, which was developed specifically for the distribution
industry.
• Application automatically reviews Summit’s billing activity at the end of each
day and compares it to all chargeback agreements loaded in the SAP system.