Use examples from the case to illustrate your answer. ((((Solve this part Urgent)))

1 of 2 mines Applications REAL WORLD CASE 1 Dow Corning and DirecTV: CRM Goes Mobile hip Reeves knows all about the life of a sales guy. That's because during his nearly 20 years ar Dow Corning, a global manufacturer of silicon-based products, he was one. He knows all too well that salespeo ple ignore any new administrative process or technology unless it allows them to make more sales or use their time more efficiently Now, as Dow Corning director of marketing and ales processes, Reeves is leading the company convergence of its CRM and e-business efforts, as well as streamlining its compliance and reporting functions. The goal, naturally, is to provide excellent customer service--and to make it easy for Dow Corning sales and marketing staff to use the expan. sive CRM system. Realny. Reeves also served as the chairman for the Americas SAP User Group's customer management group, so he knows both the power and limitations of enterprise technologies and the reality of how salespeople use CRM tools on mobile devices such as Laptops and smart phones. Both topics are important if you're to bring mobility to corporate applications. Many companies and CIOs are struggling to determine exactly how best to mobile critical applications that can bring measurable payback to the company but also limit the disruption to and administrative headaches in their users' lives. "Salespeople don't want to get on their devices for 30 minutes after a sales call," says Christopher Fletcher, a research director who specializes in mobile applications at AMR Research. Salespeople by nature are independent, autonomous, and don't always play by cor- porate rules. It's sometimes tough to get them to use what seems like administrative functions so that management can have better control Reeves says he is always balancing the poshback from the sales folks with the CRM demands of the business. "Heavy involvement with the salespeople has been key, and we're trying to be responsive to them," he notes. "But by no means do we have that balance perfected yet." A huge part of Reeves' task has been to ensure that Dow Corningcore enterprise applications, which rest on SAP suite of products, are intact and can be used by all users in Dow Corning's sales and marketing group. "A lot of what we've done in the CRM space has been putting a foundation in to help our people work more effectively and give them more access to information," Reevessays While Dow Coming had been smoothing out the back. office infrastructure, however, Reeves and his team also had to ensure that salespeople were being listened to and would want to use the mobile devices and applications. His team approached that by looking at a day in the life of a salesper son," he says. "Thinking through their information and task needs, what were their priorities, what were their common tasks, what were the proces pain points." One thing became immediately clear to Reevest When equipping mobile teams (such as the sales force less is at ways more. He says that he has preached a low input, high curpur" strategy that has guided the entire mobile deploy ment. Adding dozens and dozens of input fields to salespeo ple's BlackBerry screens, which forces them to do son of extra work is a recipe for disaster. "We've tried to weed out and simplify the processes. What are we going to need to know and how do we need that information," he says. "There's always a logical explanation for why a field is there. But then the question is Do we really need it? We're con Stantly trying to move toward a simpler set of questions." Since first piloting the devices, Reeves says the mobile team has been working with the salespeople hilities and address their ongoing concerns. "We are con stantly in change management mode," he says. For example, there wed to be more than a dozen classi fications of customer sales opportunities and two screens full of data to input for each sales opportunity. Now there is one opportunity type that can be filled out on just one screen Salespeople can get what Reeves calls "quick links" on SAP CRM data on their BlackBerrys simply by clicking an icon. These quick links show critical des, such as each salesper son's les by customer, open order statuses, and customer complaints (which is important for a salesperson dropping in on a customer). Before the mobile deployment, when a cus tomer asked to check on order status, the Dow Coming sale rep had to call into Dow Corning customer service opera tions, Reeves notes. Now the sales rep ets that in seconds on his BlackBerry For Reeves, it all come back to How much quicker can we get that responsiveness?" FIGURE 8.2 weak cap Mobile CRM increase sales productivity and improves relationships with ammes Sarah Chapter 8 / Enterprise Business Systems 311 In addition, the sales lead-generation process has been streamlined for salespeople on the BlackBerrys. Again, the quick links allow them to view critical lead information and input data that's tailored specifically to the mobile device's screen size, Reeves says. Using the SAP Portal technology that lead generation data flows back into Dow Corning's CRM system without a salesperson having to open up the CRM application," Reeves notes. So far, he estimates that the simplified lead follow-up via the mobile SAP application saves 15 to 30 minutes per lead and increases the likelihood for follow-up. Satellite TV provider DirecTV ran into similar chal- lenges when implementing their mobile CRM solution. DirecTV works with more than 6,000 independent dealers who resell its service to residential customers. Directly serving those distributors is a team of nearly 700 area sales managers, who need critical information, such as financial data, active service requests, and activation and cancellation rates, while in the field. For several years, DirecTV has been a satisfied user of Siebel's CRM On De- mand system, but it didn't work for field sales managers who couldn't carry around a laptop, says Erik Walters, a program manager for DirecTV's sales and operations arm. "For our guys, that's not mobile enough." Walters' team faced an increasingly common problem in companies with mobile sales and field employees, such as Dow Corning and many others: how to mobilize an existing enterprise application. DirecTV coupled the back-end CRM application with mobile middleware from Antenna Software. Antenna creates front-end systems that tap into popular enterprise mobility platforms like BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, providing data to mobile users from various databases via a single inte- grated interface. "DirecTV has 675 employees using Antenna, vastly increasing the productivity of sales managers," Walters says. In the past, an industrious area sales manager would be lucky to see three or four customers a day; now it's closer to 10 or 12. The move to a mobilized CRM platform is part of a broader shift in the way DirecTV sales managers interact with dealers. The company is changing how it handles calls and requests from dealers, Walters says. "Everybody is look- ing for that 360-degree view of the dealer customer." To get that view, DirecTV will implement the hosted Call Center On Demand product from Siebel parent Oracle for incom- ing phone queries from dealers. The success of the mobi- lized CRM On Demand has given the company confidence to move to a more hosted model for its overall relationship with this critical group of resellers. Enterprise vendors have certainly realized the impor- tance of mobility and have increased their capabilities and offerings, says Fletcher. Shailesh Rao, vice president of product management at SAP, says, "Customers are demand- ing that every application vendor provide mobile access. Raouses Dow Corning's situation as an example of the overall trend that CIOs need to realize. "It's not application-centric anymore; it's more scenario-based information access for mobile workers," he says. "We're not so much talking about the applications. I just want to provide the information the business users want and need the most-irrespective of where the information is coming from." For any CIO starting out on a mobile endeavor right now, AMRS Fletcher offers these pieces of advice. First, bc- fore CIOs start any project, figure out what you want to happen at the end of the project, such as exactly what sales- people will get out of the new system and how long it will take to get payback on the rollout "Know what your busi- ness case is and stick to it," he says. And second, don't forget the carrot with the stick: "You have to tell salespeople, 'You're going to start using this new CRM system, and you're going to be able to give better quotes to customers.' Or 'we promise to give you 40 new qualified leads every monthbut you have to put that criti- cal information into the system," he says. Ar Dow Corning, Reeves says, his salespeople now have a competitive advantage, but it's still early on in the transfor mation. I have a lot of excitement at where we're at today and what's possible looking ahead," Reeves says. But there's more work to do." Source: Alapted from Thomas Wailgum, "Mobile CRM: Why Louis More CO., October 19, 2007 and Richard Martin, DirecTV Gets Truly Mobile CRM, Informatiek, August 11, 2008