Tight project management and winning end-user support
has enabled a buying consortium to achieve a impressive return on
investment on a low-cost customer relationship management
implementation.
The Consortium for Purchasing and Distribution, a £40m-a-year
buying organisation with 30,000 UK customers, implemented the Geac
customer relationship management system in four weeks.
Joe Caddell, business systems director for the Consortium, said,
"The system has already paid for itself in the first month of
operation."
The Geac Opportunity Management CRM system runs on an IBM
iSeries 820 server and was installed and integrated into the
Consortium's existing Geac System 21 Aurora enterprise resource
planning software over the Christmas holiday period. The full cost
of the project was less than £20,000.
The new CRM system gives the Consortium's 50 buyers a single
view of the customer and has simplified processes that had been
prone to introducing data errors, said Jo Trigg, marketing manager
for the Consortium.
Val Kirby, business systems development manager, said the
Consortium was able to get such a rapid return on investment
because it kept tight control of the project. "We had a very clear
view of what we wanted to achieve. We wanted something that would
work from day one, so we didn't allow scope creep."
The installation was also made easier because the Consortium is
a long-standing Geac customer.
Kirby said it had been important to ensure end-user acceptance
of the new system, but said, "We had such good buy-in from the
staff that we didn't have to do a hard selling job. From the first
presentation, the advantages it would bring were obvious to the
users."
The roll-out was accompanied by comprehensive training and user
notes which illustrated how the system would be used by the
business, said Kirby.
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