OGCbuying.solutions, the procurement arm of the Office
of Government Commerce, has begun to see the benefits of a customer
relationship management system it phased in during
2005.
The system, from Onyx, replaced 14 databases to provide a single
view of customer records. It has helped OGCbuying.solutions handle
a 60% increase in procurement activity, to £2.1bn from £1.3bn two
years ago, but a spokesman said there were other advantages from
gaining a single, organisation-wide customer view.
"Now that we have that single customer view, we can see which
areas of a framework contract [with a supplier for a product or
service] are being used and which are not," said Stephen Heard,
director of customer relations at OGCbuying.solutions.
"It also lets us give a much better service to the public
sector, since we can be far more targeted in our approach."
The Onyx system has replaced disparate customer databases,
primarily held in Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Goldmine.
In all, more than 40,000 customer records were migrated to the new
system, after passing through a lengthy data cleansing and
de-duplication process.
OGCbuying.solutions operates a Microsoft server and desktop
environment, with the Onyx CRM system sitting alongside Coda
Financials and an internally developed datawarehouse.