Many companies seem to have lost focus of the reason they are in business. For most businesses it`s quite simple. They want to find a product that fulfils a need, take an order (sometimes called selling), source the product (buy it, or build it), fulfil the order and get paid for it.
Or is it that simple?
Certainly in the beginning things are relatively simple. The owner of the business has an intimate knowledge of his operation, and of his customers` requirements and is flexible enough to adapt to any change in those requirements.
According to Mark Ehmke, Managing Director of Staffware SA and local chair of the Workflow Management Coalition, who spoke at the recent Business Intelligence World conference in Johannesburg: "Companies can become a victim of their own success. A successful business attracts more customers, requiring additional staff to service these new customers and thereby gradually loses the flexibility that usually attracted customers to the company in the first place.
"The situation becomes complicated because with multiple people involved, more subtle influences come into play. These include customer preferences, loyalty, service and relationships; and many other things, such as multiple suppliers," he says.
However, Ehmke points out, worrying about these things is important - because if you don`t, your competitor will steal your customers from under your nose. And without customers, running a business becomes irrelevant.
"As businesspeople, we are all looking for the solution that will allow us to predict our customers` requirements and achieve that elusive goal of customer satisfaction," Ehmke remarks.
Yet, he maintains, most customer requirements are pretty standard, looking for the following from their interactions with a company:
* A single point of contact - when they contact a company, they want it to be able to address all of their immediate needs through a single point of contact.
* Knowledgeable - customers want the company contact to have an intimate knowledge of their requirements, including existing transactions, preferences, their current needs and those that they may not even be aware of - and to correlate these with the relevant solution that they provide.
* Convenience - customers want to be able to contact a product or service provider any time, any place, anywhere, regardless of how and when they choose.
* Track progress - customers want all their requests to be quickly and effectively managed, tracked and fulfilled from end to end. Customers expect their supplier to be proactive, not reactive.
He believes, however, that almost every organisation approaches this goal incorrectly. "They are usually broken into the 'action` type, that focuses on automating the customer interface - by implementing customer relationship management (CRM), an information portal or a call centre - or the 'analytical` type, that focuses on business intelligence and knowledge management.
"The problem with both these approaches is that they address the symptoms of customer dissatisfaction and not the cause."
Ehmke continues: "What seems obvious to me is that customer satisfaction is not something that can be provided in isolation. Every aspect of the company needs to work together with the same goal of customer satisfaction in mind; otherwise, an inconsistent level of customer service will result from different interactions with the customer."
He points out that the so-called "Intelligent Business" model, as proposed by the Intelligent eBusiness magazine, provides a workable method for achieving this.
"The Intelligent Business model suggests that an integrated process-based architecture, which allows a business to be proactive as well as reactive, should be implemented prior to investing in any other technology designed to improve the way a business operates. This thinking seems accurate, when looking at the well-documented problems associated with technologies such as CRM, enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), which all seem to suffer from the same issue of isolation from the rest of the business," he emphasises.
According to Ehmke, the model works because it is based on business processes. Business processes underpin all business transactions and are the least common denominator - in plain terms, they "are the way things get done". They touch everything in an organisation, from the customer to the back-office, through the supply chain and finally to the financial transactions involved.
He admits that business software has long been used to support key business processes, and that there is nothing new in this notion.
"What has changed, is the realisation that the easiest way for organisations to be competitive, manage costs, be viable, be flexible and responsive, is to understand and improve the structure and execution of their business processes. Controlling, tracking and improving your processes is key to improving efficiency, productivity, cost containment and, most importantly, providing consistent customer service (and hence predictable customer satisfaction). And deploying process-based software is key to achieving this," he says.
"Additionally, plug CRM, ERP, information portals, supply chains, call centres, data warehouses, document, imaging or content management, balanced scorecards, or any other technology you care to name into the model and they become part of an integrated whole, achieving a framework that allows an organisation to become as flexible as they were when they were started by their founder those many years ago," he claims.
This is what is known as business process management (BPM) and is being seen by analysts such as the Doculabs, Gartner, Delphi, Meta and Hurwitz Group as the saviour of the IT department in finally delivering on its promises to business to deliver flexible business solutions that fit the company culture and offer customer service, while still maintaining an integrated architecture that will fit future company requirements.
"The Intelligent Business model is being used extremely successfully in a number of vertical industries, especially in the financial, insurance, utilities and telcos markets around the world today," he concludes.
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