By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Talking Heads album Remain In Light:
IFS, a global enterprise applications vendor, has announced that Hecla Mining Company has signed a contract to implement IFS Applications at its Coeur d’Alene, Idaho headquarters, with plans to expand the implementation to all domestic and international facilities.
Hecla Mining Company finds, extracts, and markets precious metals. The company primarily explores and develops mineral properties and mines and processes silver, gold, lead and zinc.
“At our headquarters, we had been using a legacy system that had been custom programmed in the 1970s and 1980s. We were using different business software products at our other facilities worldwide,” Hecla Controller Alan MacPhee said. “We picked IFS since we needed the functionality and capability of a tier-one product, and we required greater agility and ease of implementation than other enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications could deliver.”
The IFS product’s service oriented component architecture doesn’t have the high maintenance of more traditional tier-one products, Hecla officials felt, adding that the “reporting capabilities of IFS Applications will make compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley that much easier.”
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The Dutch telecom provider KPN has selected IBM as its lead System Integrator to transform its billing systems, establish a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product, and transform its business intelligence over the next three years.
IBM Global Business Services will implement a new CRM suite based on Oracle eCommunications (including Siebel) that will provide KPN with “a complete customer view across all products, services, channels and interactions,” company officials say.
KPN officials hope the CRM foundation will provide the basis for differentiating customer service at all touch points and will deliver enhanced customer insight for cross- and up-selling. The combination of CRM data analysis and enhanced business intelligence is expected to support KPN’s customer focused operations.
“As we are one of the first customers to deploy the new Oracle eCommunications suite end-to-end, including Siebel CRM and Portal Billing, IBM’s experience with other leading clients and the relationship between IBM and Oracle were of great importance to us,” says Jan Muchez, CIO of KPN.
KPN provides Dutch consumers and households with a range of fixed and mobile telephony, Internet, and TV services. Company officials say that the “impact of convergence,” driven by technology developments like all-IP and Web 2.0, means that “KPN needs to establish a flexible customer-centric IT infrastructure.”
So, as lead IT services provider, IBM will help KPN with this transformation for billing, CRM, and business intelligence. For KPN’s current and next generation IP-based services, IBM will establish customer-centric end-to-end billing streets, covering mediation, billing, presentment, collections, and revenue assurance.
“Customer Centric Billing” must support all KPN’s customers for KPN and third-party products or services, in any business model for batch and real-time transactions.
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SAS, a vendor of business intelligence products, has announced that Office Depot has selected SAS Customer Intelligence across its global enterprise.
In 2005, Office Depot decided to deploy a global analytical CRM product. At the time, Office Depot in Europe was using SAS Marketing Automation to evaluate the financial and logistical impact of different communication plans, but different products were used in other corporate regions. So Office Depot chose additional products of the SAS Customer Intelligence suite.
“We wanted to use our experience with SAS in Europe on a global basis,” said Tim Toews, CIO at Office Depot. “Our goal is to support our global business with a consistent set of applications.” Office Depot selected SAS to run on the SolarisTM 10 Operating System from Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for SAS, has said recently that SAS reinvests 24 percent of revenue back into R&D.
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Vital Insight Group, a vendor of customer loyalty products, has announced the addition of Mario Sacco as vice president of Sales and Client Management. In his new role, Sacco is responsible for managing the firm’s customer base and expanding implementation of the Foresight application (formerly AutoSurvey) into new markets.
Sacco brings more than 20 years experience in the enterprise software products industry to the VIG management team. He has previously worked for SAS Canada, Peregrine Systems, Compuware Corporation, and Sterling Software.
Foresight is a CRM product aimed at the automotive industry, designed to help dealers identify key business problems, develop operational innovations to resolve them, and prevent client defection.
The Foresight application “allows an organization to monitor and measure their client’s experience in minutes, not days or weeks, as well as measuring the resolution rate,” according to company officials.
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British wine importer and supplier Stevens Garnier has announced the implementation of De Facto Software’s S5 Accounting and ERP product, described by Garnier officials as “flexible, providing all the features needed for the Wine and Drinks sector, within a standard package,” a full nose and traces of oak and toast.
De Facto Software will implement their core financials, logistics, and CRM modules for Stevens Garnier ready for mid-September 2007, in time for its busy pre-Christmas period.
Mark Prince, managing director of De Facto Software, said, in his opinion, “no other accounting and ERP product provides such a rich set of features in such a cost effective package.” De Facto Software specializes in the needs of the wine and drinks trade and related market places.
Based in Ipswich, its delivers ERP systems throughout the UK. The product encompasses financials, logistics, CRM, costings, production, WMS, business intelligence and eServices in one package.
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5square.com, which sells automotive dealerships its Sales Process Software, has released its new DealerView personal reports, which “give every manager in the dealership — or the group — easy access to the exact information they need,” company officials say.
A list of reports customized for that individual pops up with a single mouse click from anywhere in the 5square Sales Process. Daily, weekly, and monthly summaries are ready “when the management team walks into the dealership every morning, covering many elements of dealership operations, including CRM, desking, F&I, inventory, and service,” 5square officials say.
The system is billed by company officials as having the ability to support groups: “Every report can be run on a rooftop, a region, and the entire group. It’s easy to measure performance consistently and quickly.”
“5square.com has already addressed the issue of a single sales process that can be easily implemented across every store in a group. Now DealerView lets group managers evaluate rooftops consistently and rapidly. This lets them try something new at one store, measure that it works, and implement it across all stores,” commented Eric Larson, 5square’s president.
The system also tracks every prospect in the showroom, in real time. Managers see which process step each deal is in, how long each process step has taken, the details of every pencil, and everything else about the deal. It’s easy for sales managers to jump into deals, and it’s easy to gauge the performance of individual sales people, teams, and managers.
DealerView integrates CRM and showroom data from the 5square.com sales system with everything that’s stored in the DMS. It goes beyond CRM and showroom control, giving the dealer a clear window into every aspect of the store’s operations.
A new, simple user interface lets 5square.com and the dealership customize each report to the exact needs of each store or group. DealerView has a user interface so simple and intuitive that managers and salespeople learn it in hours, so start-up is easy and fast. All the information can be exported as CSV and PDF files. 5square supports DMS systems from ADP, R&R, and NeoSynergy, and the company’s use of open standards makes it easy for it to add support for other DMS providers.
