Services

SAP CRM from idea for change to Go-Live
More service, more convenience and more personalized communications are being demanded due to heightened price sensitivity and ever growing competition from new markets. This challenges all organisations, especially those with a large amount of (potential) customers. It becomes more and more clear that marketing and sales people need to become more accountable for resources and results of their activities. And that they need to find ways to do more with less.

CRM today is a strategic and core operational practice of managing customer relations and we believe it should be treated this way by management. On the floor it is all about answering service calls, executing marketing campaigns, closing sales, optimizing communications with customers, anticipating their needs and wishes and resolving customer problems in order to grow and prosper as an organization.

SAP CRM Key challenges
At C-square we support you in your key challenges:
- support management in answering the question “why are we doing this”; determining the benefits, describing the KPI’s and ensuring return on investment. It is like constructing a CRM Business plan. Everybody needs to understand the value of a change.

- we support you in identifying and prioritizing your CRM value propositions for customers, partners, employees and the company as a whole, in order to:
- reduce your costs
- heighten your productivity and profitability
- create, sometimes new, profitable working relations
- serve your customers better and more intelligent
- make the organization more transparent

- we support you in designing your CRM operational blueprint so the end state vision for your new CRM operations will become clear. In this state we will help you to answer questions like: “What should my company look during and after implementation”, “Who will be my key employees during the change”, “ What is the logical order to implement a new system”. This includes determining what the specific experiences will be for your stakeholders, determining how you should deploy resources, determining how new technologies and infrastructure will be built, determining how new processes will be designed and creating a comprehensive strategy for managing the change.

- we help you to construct the CRM roadmap and implement the solution in such a way that your organization and your employees can handle it. Over the years C-square has done many successful SAP CRM implementations mostly because the phases before the implementation have been extensive and the goals and timelines realistic and clear. If you are clear about the end goal it is very important to define multiple sub projects in a program and to choose an initial CRM program with the lowest organizational risk and / or a sub project that creates an early win to ensure that employees become and stay exited and involved. In most cases, as we have experienced in larger projects a single “big bang” is not the way to go. CRM demands continuous change, so an agile solution, in an ever changing environment!

One of the biggest challenges, in any project for that matter, is making sure that the changes you are making are managed well. Most companies find change difficult, even when the benefits are clear and employees agree with the concepts and goals. New ways of conducting business introduce risk into your operations. Next to this it is never easy to get the different stakeholder groups to work together to fulfill a common vision. Internal conflicts are very common and it can make it extremely difficult to coordinate the organization to work to a common agreement of the ‘new way of working’. A person with a fresh view and without the common ‘organisational blindness’ might be a very welcome and necessary addition to the project team.

Project management
All CRM projects are different but the challenges remain the same. Our knowledge of large CRM projects makes that we do (and must do) more than just implement a technical solution. A successful implementation results in a solution that end-users want to work with. It is not a solution that needs to be changed and upgraded every year because we missed some, not so obvious, requirements at the start of a project. Defining the right KPI’s, building a strong project team and communicating with management ánd end-users are just as important as the technical side of a project. We want to go live with the project but we need it to support all the clients’ needs, now and in the future!

We always emphasize some very important fundamentals when we take on a project to lead:

- source the project teams with very committed employees and make sure to provide train-the-trainer programs so that your own employees train the rest of your staff. This ensures that you keep expert knowledge within the company.

- staff the team with technical and functional SAP consultants but also with non SAP specific marketing professionals and an external change management professional.

- make sure to involve your own employees in testing early on. This ensures that they get the system they want to work with.

- do not underestimate the importance of serious change management, not just for the middle and higher management but also for your operational staff.

- use top-down and bottom-up approaches to build support in your organization. Good ideas are to be found everywhere!

- plan in a way that is realistic but that ensures dedication. Better to plan with dedicated team members than with shifting teams.

- communicate timelines to the organization and make sure to ‘celebrate’ when they are met

- start timely with knowledge transfer to those who will be responsible for the after go-live support

Change management
Change management or, improving the organization by altering how the work is done, will have an impact on the following four parts of how your organization operates:

- processes
- systems
- organization structure
- job roles

In SAP CRM projects project management and change management are very closely linked together. At least that is how we look at it.

Project management focuses on the tasks to achieve the project requirements. Change management focuses on the people impacted by the change, but, in order to achieve the project requirements (and sometimes more).

In most successful implementations the change manager (external and internal) works very closely together with the (technical) project leader or program manager. The change person focuses on the business (communication with management and end-users, business project staffing, facilitating ways of training, (re)defining processes and structures and sometimes redefining job roles and system authorizations) and the project manager focuses on the technical side of the project (preparation, project staffing, blueprint, realization, go-live and support)

Change management is so much more than providing the customer with beautiful power points and questionnairs. A good change manager needs to feel the organization from within, needs to talk to everyone, needs to understand what it is that employees do (and think) en how they do it together. A change manager needs to be able to understand top management and end users, but in SAP CRM projects a good understanding of the system is also important. In this way the change manager can really be the glue between the technical project members and the business.