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Unifying CRM and ERP is key

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 27 Oct 2020
Andre Wissler
Andre Wissler

The Core Business Applications survey was conducted on ITWeb in partnership with Mint Group during September 2020.

The online survey captured a total of 371 valid responses, with 81% of respondents working in private sector companies, and the remaining 19% being from public sector organisations.

Private sector respondents

Half (49%) of the private sector respondents are executive or middle managers from companies of all sizes and a range of industry sectors.

74% of these report they have a digital transformation roadmap in place. 

Andre Wissler, Head of Client at Mint Group, says this percentage is higher than he would have expected, although COVID-19 may have accelerated the drive to digitally transform.

Almost 50% of respondents use Microsoft Dynamics to manage finance and operations, while 39% use SAP and 12% Oracle. Wissler says, “When you consider the size and scope of the survey pool, I would imagine this is largely true in the enterprise space. Regardless it’s encouraging to see the depths of Microsoft Dynamics usage amongst respondents.”

When it comes to CRM, the majority (64%) use Microsoft Dynamics, while just over a third (35%) use Salesforce. “Traditionally, Microsoft Dynamics is more prevalent in the local market than SalesForce, whereas globally SalesForce has a bigger footprint, especially in the US,” he explains.

Close to 70% of respondents report that they unify CRM and ERP applications. “It’s interesting to see that respondents regard this as key given that CRM is often not regarded as important as ERP applications. The fact that so many companies are unifying them means they understand the value of having them talking to each other from a customer experience (CX) point of view, providing a single customer record across the two applications.”

Well over half (66%) say they are using AI-driven customer insight technologies. “This presents a nice opportunity to explore further AI implementations around CX.”

However, 43% don't have technology that provides predictive insights, presenting an opportunity to evolve the market and introduce capabilities such as predictive analysis and predictive close rates, according to Wissler.

40% of private sector respondents haven’t done a cloud solutions assessment of their current environment. “We need to leverage this opportunity to drive assessments to identify opportunities to migrate these customers into the cloud.”

Public sector respondents

50% of the public sector respondents are at executive or middle management level. 66% of these report that they have a digital transformation roadmap in place (compared to 74% in the private sector). “This is encouraging to see,” says Wissler, “we’ve already seen some public sector entities such as SARS making great strides on this journey.”

SAP is the most popular choice when it comes to managing finance and operations, with 42% using it, followed by Microsoft Dynamics (31%) and Oracle (27%). When it comes to CRM, however, the vast majority (79%) use Microsoft Dynamics. “When you consider the relatively small pool of public sector respondents and that they traditionally defer to the State Information and Technology Agency (SITA), which is familiar with SAP, and that Microsoft Dynamics is a newcomer in this space, this is a pretty encouraging statistic. Clearly there’s further opportunity around Microsoft Dynamics, especially around citizen relationship management.”

Just over half (56%) of respondents (compared to 70% in the private sector) unify their CRM and ERP applications. “The challenge here,” explains Wissler, “is integrating SAP with other applications, which probably explains the lower unification statistic for public sector.”

Most respondents (66%) report that they are not using AI-driven customer insight technologies. Similarly, 65% don't have technology that provides predictive insights.

“This could be because a fair amount of public sector data still sits on-premises and you can’t really enable AI capabilities unless you have some sort of cloud services. Data privacy issues are proving a hindrance to getting public sector data into the cloud.”

45% of public sector respondents haven’t done a cloud solutions assessment of their current environment. 

“We definitely see a great deal of opportunity in this space around cloud solution assessments and the public sector is starting to consider cloud as a solution. The proliferation of the internet into more rural areas extends government’s reach, making it easier for them to deliver solutions where they’re needed in more remote regions – and obviously this requires them to move to the cloud.” 

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