Voraussichtliche Lesedauer: 7 minutes
Welcome to our short animated Lego video on an exemplary enterprise software landscape.
As part of our 1A-Relations Advent Calendar 2022, we have exclusively produced a video on an exemplary enterprise software landscape.
This video is intended for beginners and has no claim to completeness. Nevertheless, we would like to make it available to every visitor of our portal.
If the video has made you think about your software landscape or if you have general questions, we would be happy to offer you a free 30-minute consultation. Book an appointment directly here.
Building on this video, we’re happy to recommend our article “How does an organization’s collection of CRM software solutions evolve?”. In it, we take a look at how CRM solutions can evolve as part of your software landscape over the long term.
To read – the different sections of the video:
For us as 1A Relations, the term CRM is particularly central to a software landscape – however, in a modern software landscape, other systems play a role that we want to look at.
A complete software landscape includes – in almost all cases – an ERP system.
In addition, there is BI, the so-called Business Intelligence or also the Data Warehouse.
Then, as already mentioned, our core business is CRM, i.e. Customer Relationship Management systems.
As a rule, the following systems for multichannel communication and eCommerce are closely interwoven with this.
ERP systems
Our journey begins – as it does for many companies – when looking at their software landscape with the ERP system, the Enterprise Resource Planning system. The ERP system is the “old lady” among the software applications of many of our customers.
With the ERP, many companies started to go their own way of digitalization.
An ERP covers many functional areas. The best known are probably merchandise management, production planning, but also human resources management.
The enterprise resource planning system is thus the cornerstone of many software landscapes. The other systems are aligned with this system and are linked via interfaces in order to be able to meet increasingly complex future requirements.
What now follows the ERP system?
Business Intelligence Systems
A lot of data emerged from the daily work of the companies.
On the one hand, these data are particularly interesting for the evaluation for the operational as well as strategic control of a company.
Based on this data, so-called Business Intelligence software solutions have developed.
BI systems are to be understood as analytical information systems whose main task is to process data for analyses and queries.
Where are these results used?
Customer Relationship Management Systems
The answer is: In the enterprise CRM system.
With the emergence of an ever stronger customer orientation in the sales process, it became clear that ERP and BI could not meet these necessary requirements. It quickly became clear that a special solution was needed.
The introduction of a CRM results in the consistent orientation of a company towards its customers and the systematic design of customer relationship processes.
The associated documentation and management of customer relationships is an important component of the functions and enables in-depth relationship marketing.
So how do you reach customers?
Multichannel systems
The solutions that fulfill this task are summarized under the term multichannel.
The central idea of multichannel solutions is to reach customers or prospects on several different communication channels with coordinated campaigns.
A selection of the channels that can be addressed via multichannel are:
- Print advertisements
- catalogs
- E-mail campaigns
- Telephone campaigns
- Social media presences and
- the own website
What role does eCommerce play in this?
eCommerce systems
eCommerce extends the channel of one’s website with the commerce function.
The goal is to create a continuous and consistent buying experience on a website or web store with software.
Modern eCommerce offers a full range of functions for this purpose, from store creation, order management to AI support for improving the conversion rate.
Drag-and-drop in particular makes it possible for many companies to create webshops, which is why it’s not just traditional retail companies that are turning to eCommerce.
Let’s now take a look at BI in practice
Business Intelligence Systems
As mentioned at the beginning, BI is used to control companies.
For this purpose, the data from all the different applications must be available centrally in a data warehouse. In this way, the company’s own data can be properly prepared and, if desired, enriched by third-party providers.
This is followed by data mining, i.e. the correlation of data. This provides information from the loose data.
Finally, knowledge management is responsible for communicating the information to the company.
Which areas does CRM influence?
Customer Relationship Management Systems
In short, the answer is: Simply all of them.
But to get a better grip on the whole thing, here are a few examples:
In marketing, campaigns are now focused on a clear target group that receives individualized offers.
In data management, there is now only one customer – which drastically improves address and data quality.
Customer service significantly improves its performance because it can access a single source of truth via CRM and provide end-to-end customer care.
What purpose must my multichannel software fulfill?
Multichannel systems
The software should make the company independent of predetermined channels. Banks are a good example of this.
On the one hand, customers don’t want to be dependent on branch opening hours, but on the other hand, they don’t want to completely do without personal advice, at least over the phone.
That’s why customers are increasingly choosing who they go for on the basis of convenience. Multichannel must therefore be possible on many channels without major system disruptions. Multichannel is a flexibility feature of companies.
eCommerce – All that glitters is gold?
eCommerce systems
The somewhat boring answer applies here – “It depends”.
An eCommerce project can quickly become a burden if the web store stands alone in the context of the software landscape.
A connection to e-mail marketing or the CRM system is imperative. Without it, this channel will not be played effectively enough. In addition, there is the obligation of securing personal and payment information.
Once these factors have been taken into account, however, eCommerce offers companies additional information in addition to the sales channel thanks to its tracking and testing options.
Conclusion
This short video alone shows that a software landscape can quickly include several dozen tools that fulfill the special requirements of larger tools.
When looking at your software landscape, we would like to support you from the side of 1A-Relations.
Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete or 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.
