Supply chain and CRM Linkage

Organizations need business supply activities to maximize the customer base and gain the competitive advantage in the market. It is important to understand that the logistics contribute to the customer satisfaction by fulfilling the customer orders in minimum time. Although the term supply chain has many different perspectives, from the perspective of total supply chain management the end user is the ultimate owner of the product. The delivery process involves the customer focused market that allows the organization to achieve its goals. Organizations can perform transactional or relationship marketing based on the market segmentation and relationship marketing. 

Procurement is also an important domain

The comprehensive supply chain information system provides the resource planning and administration through the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and customer relationship management (CRM). The CRM is the backbone of most of the organizational customer management and marketing information systems. However, the concept is not limited only to the customer satisfaction as procurement plays important role in delivery the products with continuous supply and inventory management. Organizations require high operational efficiency to deal with the increased demand by the customers. The customer delivery can range from homes to warehouse with greater emphasis on in time delivery. The organizations not only require performance but also reaching the customer through the strategy for serving. Organizations need to overcome the problem of space, time, and quantity for efficient client management. Furthermore, the customer service plays important role in providing the desired product in cost-effective manner. The availability, operational performance, and service reliability leads to the perfect order. The integrated concepts of achieving the requirements, expectations, actual and perceived performance requires integrated software for providing overall customer satisfaction experience. Organizations require combinations of different system with consideration of procurement as important part of the supply chain management. The procurement process provides the potential for every dollar spent and saved from a valuable procurement strategy. The procurement strategy should focus on the lower total cost of ownership in contrast to the purchase price.  

Supplier selection and assessment must be identified to meet the buying organizations requirement

The complete supply chain network must include different management systems such as ERP and CRM system.

• The CRM system provides the ability to the organization for managing the customer orders, delivery of products, revenue, marketing, order management, products information along with strategies for reaching the target market in timely and efficient manner.
• The supply chain integrates the CRM for making the database of customer information and collecting valuable data to show the current needs and wants of the customers.
• The CRM ensures good customer relationships as the right product for the right customer at the right time in right quantity, condition, and cost.
• The CRM segments the each of the customer needs and supports the relationship marketing/cross selling.
• The CRM integration in supply chain leads to forecast the customer behavior and retains customers by analyzing the likelihood of customer purchases.
• Furthermore, the CRM can be used to run the sales promotions under any specific customer groups using the business analytics tools.

However, there can be certain challenges for integration the CRM with the SCM at the practical level. The two environments cannot be exactly same for the same phase or process. The integrated system can give end to end visibility of the supply chain for the SCM with precision ability for the product creation, modification, or replaced. The CRM also reduces the SKU complexity, increases the prediction accuracy, revenue growth, and overall supply chain cost reduction. 

Organizations must conduct compatibility audit before CRM implementation

Although, it depends on the need of the organizations to install any system with supply chain.  Last, but not least all management systems have costs associated with them. Organizations should analyze the financial resources before starting any management system project.