Why CRM / xRM?
Anything(x) Relationship Management (xRM)
is the concept of leveraging a flexible and powerful platform, to replace the customizations, spreadsheets and access databases typically built to manage business information. This information often compliments or drives your primary corporate and financial applications (ERP).
- Understand the difference between a platform and an application
xRM is a Platform. Think of Microsoft Excel, which is thought of as a spreadsheet application, but it truly is a platform. Excel doesn’t do much until you start adding your labels, cells, formatting, business rules and logic to it. After careful planning and creating, you have a model or application that solves a business problem. Excel provides commonly used functions (like summing, sorting, filtering etc.) that make your work easier and faster. xRM’s building blocks are items like people (name, address, phone number), things (products, assets, etc.), events (date, time, place), workflows (steps, rules, conditions) and tasks (things to get done, by date, who is responsible), etc.
- The xRM 80/20 rule
Achieve 80% of your business requirements by using and integrating pre-existing functionality. Then, use 20% custom development to make the application, or collective applications, do precisely what you need them to do. Create things faster than before and allow them to be built by business analysts rather than by programmers.
As our customers began to understand what xRM was, they started thinking outside of the box and wanted the ability to manage other aspects of their business, such as:
- Cows in their feed lots,
- Buildings that needed maintenance,
- Applicants for job postings,
- Contracts and their details, and much, much more...
This evolved into xRM, the “x" being the mathematical variable x which can be anything. Transpose the x for the C in CRM and you get xRM, i.e., anything relationship management.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one more example of what you can build on the xRM platform. The concept of CRM started with a Rolodex. Then someone created a software version of a Rolodex, which led to contacts targeted at automating sales (Sales Force Automation or SFA). As people and companies began to realize the value of these tools, they wanted more. This incessant appetite to want, track, do and report on more created the CRM industry, which has been going strong for a decade. About 2005, we started evangelizing the concept of doing much more than simply managing and tracking customer relationships.
Have questions?
Need more information? Contact Joe if you would like a demo or a quote. Download xRM Brochure |
