AS GORDON GECKO SAID “CHANGE IS GOOD” (actually “greed”, but hey it’s one letter different! OK?!)
We recently experienced “Change” ourselves when we were forced to change our URL from www.sapglobalconsulting.com to www.erpassessments.com Hence, the long gap in writing this particular blog!
Anyway, all of the familiar symptoms came up, anger, fear, resentment, and…..opportunity! Believe me “Opportunity” was not even an early realization! It takes time to absorb even minor changes.
Often when we are confronted with change the immediate reaction is to consider the losses…not the potential gains. In our case we felt we were losing our connection with SAP and SAP Global Consulting which is our core business and has been for the past 10 years. On the other hand it is also an opportunity to modify our thinking and consider broader issues in systems implementation such as vision, strategy, alignment of thinking, risk assessment, business case and support for the vision during implementation etc.
Our conclusion was this was in fact an exciting opportunity to explore some of the deeper aspects of change beyond the SAP world. It is also away for us to examine the impacts of the social media in terms of cultural shifts. Some of these represent important communications in the design of any system such as Customer Relationship Management. The world in general, and markets in particular are shifting to a different relationship with customers. With information access and overload the need becomes one of whom to trust with our data? We looking for a deeper and longer lasting relationship with those we deal with? We want a relationship not a transaction. This means that companies must change their approach to system design. It also means that they must complete more analysis of the habits and demographics of their customers and find better ways to serve them. These could be in the form of dedicated Order Entry staff assigned to a particular customer based on their long term “value” or even offering special pricing. This data is in conventional systems however it is sometimes difficult to retrieve without specific mining tools. Many industries are looking for the ways to change their CRM and this presents a great opportunity to take companies to the next level of business performance. For more information please go to www.erpassessment.com and the use of a business alignment tool.
