Customer Data Integration

ABC wishes to create an enterprise resource planning (ERP) management system that will support and coincide with its business objectives.  In order to accomplish this, it must ask crucial questions that demand factual and documented answers.  These types of answers will provide managers with tools they need to assess their distant and direct partners.  The two most important sets of data for an ERP system are customer and external environment data.

The goals of customer data collection are to create a single, accurate and complete view of the customer, and to utilize that intelligence through each customer interaction at every touch point enterprise-wide.  The types of data that need to be collected on the customer should be found in either the customer relationship management (CRM) system or in the backend details of ABC’s financial and accounting system.  When the information in these two systems is combined, the ERP infrastructure is in place to begin answering the critical questions of the operational agenda.  The data that needs to be collected on the customer are listed below:

• Personal data
• Products and services bought
• Billing data
• Company-wide services being ordered on a growing basis
• Inside notes on issues, complaints and resolutions

Once this customer data integration (CDI) is entered into a single database that is then used to answer the pertinent business objective questions on a company-wide basis, ABC’s ERP system is the ending result.  However, ABC still lacks the information that a complete knowledge management (KM) system can provide.  In order to accomplish its KM goals, ABC must answer certain questions with regard to its external environment.

A company’s external environment can be broken down into three segments:  1.  The surrounding environment consisting of economic, social, political, technological and ecological issues; 2. the market environment consisting of entry barriers, supplier power, buyer power, substitute availability and competitive rivalry; and 3. the operating environment consisting of competitors, creditors, customers, labor and supplies.  Each one of these segments must be thoroughly investigated and questions must be answered for all of these areas in regard to ABC’s operational goals.  Once the company is educated on the external environment, this information can be combined with the CDI and ERP data to create the KM system.  This KM system will provide ABC with a 360° view of its customer and external environment.  Now ABC can begin focusing on profitability.

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