As J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. began the process of selecting a software solution to replace our legacy sales and marketing applications, we knew it would be challenging. We needed to select a system that permitted us to serve and satisfy our customers and clients, enabled us to become a real-time enterprise, allowed us to be more agile and responsive with product and service launches, and supported our growth.

We also had to consider how a new system would integrate with our R/3 back-office system that went live in 1999. To accomplish this, we launched a strategic assessment in which we took a detailed look at 10 of our key corporate business processes and evaluated how different software solutions could meet our needs.

We started by having five large CRM vendors each present a day-long demonstration of their solutions and how they would address our business requirements. Over 10% of our workforce attended the demonstrations. We evaluated the solutions against a list of 160 detailed business requirements that we had gathered and documented beforehand and rated them across 13 categories. After the demos, we used the results of the evaluations and narrowed the potential solutions down to two (including SAP CRM) and began the detailed strategic assessment of how each would meet our needs.

Let me walk you through our assessment processes and show you how we decided that SAP CRM best suited our needs. In a future article I’ll go into detail about how we developed our SAP CRM roadmap.

The Strategic Assessment

We identified 10 key business scenarios to evaluate during the strategic assessment. A scenario, for our purposes, is an end-to-end sequence of integrated process steps with a defined objective. Different groups or roles within the organization may carry out the process steps. Scenarios must cover the full cycle of plan-prepare-execute-control.

During this step, we were careful to avoid selecting only mature or existing processes for discussion because we wanted to ensure that the new system could accommodate processes we develop as we grow. The team talked with executives and business leaders throughout the company to identify not only what their current critical processes were, but also what strategic initiatives were in the plans for the next five to 10 years and beyond. The company did not want to select a new CRM system that could only satisfy our current needs. The 10 scenarios we identified were:

1. Launching a new product

2. Executing an annual catalog campaign

3. Developing and selling to a national account

4. Designing, manufacturing, and selling a custom product

5. Cross-selling through sales channels

6. Executing a drive-to-Web campaign

7. Managing trade show activities

8. Providing customer self-service through a portal

9. Renewing and fulfilling a subscription product

10. Selling to customers in the field effectively

After we identified the key scenarios, we documented and diagrammed all process steps within each scenario to identify the complexity, handoffs between people and systems, and data integration points. Figure 1 shows the diagram we developed to better understand how two closed-loop processes (pipeline/account development and marketing/campaign execution) integrated with back-office processes such as customer research, marketing planning, and order processing. For example, for the pipeline/account development process, we start with the customer and then find matching products and services. Conversely, for the marketing/campaign process, we start with a marketing offer and then find matching customers.

Figure 1

Process map showing how two closed-loop processes integrate with each other as well as back-office processes and systems

We created the diagram in Figure 2 to look at an individual closed-loop process more closely. We used this diagram to identify each of the process steps and determine the level of complexity of each step.

Figure 2

Scenario flow showing the marketing/campaign closed-loop process framework

We also used these discussions and diagrams to help identify improvement opportunities in our current scenarios and processes. These improvement opportunities, or gaps, became important discussion points as we evaluated the potential solutions. We didn’t just want to rebuild our current imperfect scenarios and processes in a new system — we wanted to refine and improve the way we did business.

Prioritizing Our Business Scenarios

After we reviewed our business processes, we took the 10 key scenarios and plotted them on a graph with organizational integration on the x axis and value contribution on the y axis (Figure 3). Processes that appeared in the upper right corner of the grid (high organizational integration/complexity and high value contribution) are the processes that we focused on the most for the strategic assessment.

Figure 3

Business process priority matrix showing value contribution and organizational integration (complexity)

The high-priority processes are the most complex and critical processes to the organization. We needed to make sure our CRM solution could handle these effectively. For our company, processes such as launching a new product or developing and selling to a national account were considered high value, whereas other processes were considered less crucial.

By using the matrix in Figure 3, we eliminated any conflicts around competing priorities. We looked at each process objectively to evaluate its value contribution and complexity, thereby reducing the chance that one department would advocate a higher priority for one of its business processes.

Technical Architecture

Another step of the strategic assessment was to identify what the future system architecture would look like with each of the software options. With the help of experienced consultants, we developed system maps that showed the architecture for each of the potential CRM systems and for several of the key scenarios (Figure 4). This helped us understand the complexity of the system architecture, the potential system integration challenges, what middleware we needed, how data flowed between the system components, and what the key differences between the two solutions were.

Figure 4

Example of one system map we developed to show a potential CRM configuration (Source: J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc.)

Solution Selection

Through this assessment, we determined that SAP CRM best fulfilled our business objectives and requirements. These included real-time capabilities, vendor stability, implementation considerations, staffing requirements, software functionality, and financial resource requirements (e.g., hardware and software licenses). To help us arrive at this decision, we identified the key differentiators between our options. These included functionality, technical performance, usability, and technical integration.

Functionality. This did not prove to be a differentiator because both of the solutions we reviewed had comprehensive and mature offerings. Each would have met our core business requirements and allowed us the flexibility to grow in the future. Some functional gaps were identified in each solution, but none of these were insurmountable.

Technical performance. We explored the technical performance of each solution to determine if each could handle our volume of users, customers, orders per day, and customer contacts per day. We determined that technical performance would not be a differentiator because both potential solutions could have handled our transaction and data volumes given an appropriate hardware configuration.

Usability. We saw usability as a potential differentiator, although we knew we would have to enhance the user interface (UI) in either solution. At the time we were evaluating mySAP CRM 4.0. We anticipate fewer enhancements will be required now, based on the improved UI in SAP CRM 2007.

Technical integration. The technical integration turned out to be the most significant differentiator we identified. The increased complexity of our enterprise architecture with R/3 Enterprise (later upgraded to SAP ERP Central Component [ECC] 6.0) in the back office and another vendor’s solution in the front office presented a significant challenge. Building a real-time integration of SAP ERP and another vendor’s CRM would require highly skilled architects on an ongoing basis. They would have to follow a clear, vendor-neutral roadmap and could not make decisions based on their individual platform considerations. J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. did not have these skills in-house and our research showed these skills were not widely available externally.

After making our decision to implement SAP CRM, we had to identify an appropriate implementation plan and sequence. We did not believe a big-bang approach would work for us, so we had to identify a way to break up the implementation into manageable phases and determine the correct sequencing for them. I cover the implementation roadmap we developed in the article "Essential Steps for Planning a CRM Implementation Roadmap" in the CRM hub of SAPexperts..

Tom Ditzler

Tom Ditzler has been employed at J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. for 10 years. He has served in sales, marketing, and business analyst positions and now is leading the company through a multi-year implementation of SAP CRM, SAP NetWeaver Portal, and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence. Tom holds numerous certificates in project management, training, and education.

You may contact the author at tditzler@jjkeller.com.

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