In real life, unhealthy corporate culture is the stuff of tragedy, not comedy, and it is not insults that cause the most harm, but rather callousness about people’s time. After all, time is money for the staff as much as it is for the ISO9001 certification. According to the Harvard Business Review, a horrible boss is someone who expects “subordinates to be on call 24/7 and to hit unrealistic deadlines with limited resources. When the work product is delivered, horrible bosses may ignore it for long intervals, making it clear that the deadline was artificial and the stress unnecessary.”

However, I’m not here to bash bosses. I’ve worked with some amazing ones over the years and I believe that there are far more good bosses than there are bad. Instead, let’s talk about the corporate culture that is created around these bosses and what the implications are to their roles as leaders.

Thunderstorms and Flowers

Every business entity has more than a public identity, a set of policies and procedures and a brand. Beyond these parameters is a thriving culture of human activity, and each organizational group has a unique set of skills, dreams, and passions. Is a healthy corporate culture able to leverage this uniqueness and hone it into superior performance, strong communications, and high quality production? When compared to the alternative, the answer seems obvious.

In a business that has an unhealthy culture, employees act as individuals, performing their duties to meet their own needs or the needs of another individual, often at the cost of their own needs or possibly one of their subordinates. Like in the movie, this type of culture has actually been able to produce productive, high revenue generating machines. However, healthy cultures have not only been able to increase the performance of a business, but also build a sense of comfort and happiness among their team members. When I talk about these two clashing corporate cultures, I imagine thunderstorms verses flowers. Which do you believe is more powerful?

Happiness on Paper

Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay), the CEO of Zappos and widely regarded as one of the most innovative Internet marketers of all time, believes that his entire business revolves around one thing: happiness.

But corporate culture is not just about nice words on paper. It is about the actions and reactions of an organization’s leaders. When times get tough, how does the CEO, the manager, or the lead hand react?

Stefan Ferrario is the VP of Columbia Containers, a transloading company based out of the Port of Vancouver. Ferrario finds that “it is really the response to stressors that [shows] the true colors of a company, or person, for that matter . . . When Michael McCain, CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, came on TV, surely against the advice of his lawyers, to apologize about the effects of the listeria outbreak – that was a reaction to an event. It is very easy for [Maple Leaf] to say, we have high quality meats and we care about you, but when the CEO gets on TV, emotionally connecting . . . that is a powerful show of their business culture.”

In a company that values workers for their contribution to the business, the employees experience high morale and tend to share common goals. A strong and healthy corporate culture has high employee retention, is able to maintain a positive reputation, has high productivity, and carefully delivers high quality products. The most effective of these cultures go beyond what is on paper and are led by actions rather than by words.

“We have an organic culture built on respect, courtesy, care and helpfulness, for each other and for our stakeholders,” Ferrario explains. “This is something that is increasingly difficult to maintain the larger we get. At first we didn’t have many policies or protocols and as we grew, we added more people from different walks of life; it became obvious that ‘respect, courtesy, care and helpfulness’ is a different standard for everyone.”

Leading by Example

MyYogaOnline.com is a top yoga and wellness video streaming website owned by Fresh Eye Productions Inc. Its CEO, Jason Jacobson, uses his personality, direction, and enthusiasm to guide his employees. Although the other two co-founders of My Yoga Online are yogis, Jacobson is a former amateur boxer. With some, how can I put this, unorthodox yoga poses, he participates in professionally taught yoga classes alongside his staff to build common ground.

“My Yoga Online is a wellness company, and as a result, we strongly take into consideration current and future employees’ interest and dedication to their own health and wellness when hiring and introducing new initiatives. Not everyone can be alike in a corporation . . . but a common interest in one specific realm can really bring a company together. It is not a priority that all staff participate [in our yoga classes], but to date we have had 100% participation. This group act has truly developed a stronger bonding and camaraderie amongst all our staff and as a result led to a much higher comfort level and sense of community amongst our employees.”

Smiling at the Bottom Line

These thriving companies likely have a lot more going for them than just corporate culture, but let’s look at what a recent study on corporate culture has concluded. The Riding the Rapids report, commissioned by PSN and McGrigors LLP and led by Professor Rita Marcella of Aberdeen Business School, is based on interviews with CEOs and directors from major oil and gas operators and contractors in the UK, USA and Canada. The interviewees represented a significant section of the oil and gas industry, employing more than 740,000 people, in over 130 countries.

The details of this report are beyond the scope of this article, but Bob Ruddiman, Head of Energy at McGrigors LLP, sums up the research by saying “companies with a robust corporate culture and a strong understanding of their position in the market place will be best placed to prosper in the long run while companies which are disjointed and constantly fire-fighting will be vulnerable and may not survive the current downturn.”

Despite the type of culture they are nourishing, businesses of all sizes are constantly at a different stage of development – whether they intend to be or not. During stable times, when revenue is high and sales calls are quick, it is often easy to overlook simple things that can bring a group together over the long haul and carry a company through its ups and downs.

It would be nice if everyone loved their work all the time, but business has to go on regardless. “We are all at work to serve our customers one way or another, without our customers, none of us would have the jobs we do – simple as that.” Ferrario goes on to say “When you are not loving your work, you need to realize it is short-sighted, and dangerous, to let temporary negative feelings resonate, at any reach. If the negative feelings are ongoing or permanent, something needs to be changed.”

When life is good and staff are happy, nurturing a corporate culture is still extremely important. As with all aspects of business, when growth is occurring, management is increasingly challenged to become innovative in its policies and procedures, and they need to remain focused on nurturing changes in their culture. This way, when times get tough, the true nature of the business shines through the hardship and staff will smile and work together – not because they are scared of loosing their paychecks, but because they believe in what the company is doing and treat the customers like family.

Thunderstorms are powerful and can break through barriers and ignite a market quickly, but at the end of the day it is the flowers that stay around all season, grow like wild, and come back again and again to impress you with their vibrant and unique colours. A horrible boss will make their staff’s lives miserable. This culture will be reflected in the final product. An outstanding boss will grow with their staff and guide them to use the full potential of their unique abilities and, believe me when I say this, customers will notice.

There is no “one size fits all” solution here. It is about adapting to diversity and bringing a sense of belonging, a sense of happiness to your workplace that will allow your team to stay focused – even when the going gets tough. This is where organizational units will break through the numbers of productivity and output something far beyond, where quality and innovation live.

One of the strongest responses you can get from a customer is a smile. They say the simplest way to get someone to smile is to smile at them first. On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you right now?

According to Gartner, social CRM will be a $1 billion sub-sector of the CRM market by the end of this year. The various sites, blogs and communities that comprise this arena represent the fastest growing areas of the Internet. According to Nielsen Online, social networks now reach more people than email.

Salesforce states that as the growth of social media explodes, service departments need to influence customer conversations. Integrating social media into the contact center is a huge opportunity—both to delight your customers and to save money.

SugarCRM has added social features, and is in a simple form that allows users to decide how they leverage social data and channels inside the Sugar system. For example, users can now monitor Twitter streams of their customers, as well as uncover leads and relationship data from networks like LinkedIn and place it into the CRM records.

CRM is still working through the implications of Social Networks.  From my perspective, Social CRM has been defined in a restricted format by those that try to support and practice it, and we are yet to realize its true potential.  No one has dared to define the scope and implement the tools to fully harness this marketing and PR power.  Maybe it’s too soon?

I remember the early times of CRM – way before it became an acronym. Supply management system, accounting systems, sales force automation systems, ticket systems, the list is long.  The madness that often came with these disjunctive systems was boggling. The duplication of effort was clearly prohibitive from a cost perspective, but at the time, the cost of missed opportunities was drastically higher, so the markets pushed it forward.

With new social spheres like Google+ popping up out of the woodworks, social data, marketing, and mining opportunities are growing exponentially and it has become equal madness to it’s predecessors. The market will carry the madness, however, eventually harnessing it into unfathomable opportunities.

What is the situation of your relationship with your client?  If you are keeping up with the times, you have all sorts of digital relationships with them.  Maybe you’re reaching out through advertising to bring them back to a website or micro websites.  You’re probably conversing with them through a multitude of social media channels to invite them into dialogue.  You could be directing them through their mobile devices in order to bring them in and reward their participation in loyalty programs. It’s also likely that some of you reading this are doing all of the above.

With all this interaction being digital, every message, every name, every campaign renders invaluable data that informs you about the nature of your client and your relationship with them; however much of this data is lost in cyberspace.

Figure 1. Twitter Stream Graph where the subject includes "coffee" (Image Provided by Neoformix)

What are the semantics of what people are talking about in your demographic?  What benefits do your service providers appreciate?  What publications do your target market frequent?  Where do they look for help?  What drives them to repeat purchases?  Who are their friends and acquaintances?

In this new world there are no limits to where and how the organization can find, engage and interact with the client. Wherever they are, whatever they are doing, it is possible to present them with a relevant experience, an appropriate call to action, an appealing value proposition. The advertising infrastructure has now become a customer relationship infrastructure, and it opens amazing new opportunities and possibilities.

Cyberspace technology is catching up, and even before the business is ready to take advantage of the benefits, we have a new set of offerings called Data Management Platforms (DMP).  Yes, another acronym – talk to the geeks in charge.  The rules are still being written on what a DMP is, but the essence here is that they are capable of capturing, rationalizing and merging all of these data points, enriching them with third party data and funneling it to where the data is actionable.

DMPs are just beginning, but there will be new tools popping up in the next few years with full comprehensive solutions for marketing.  Regardless of how the channel shakes out, data will always be a key contributing factor to the success of modern campaigns, and, like always, marketing executives will be utilizing it’s potential.

Adobe, Lotame, BlueKai and others are pioneering this space, but on another level, small businesses are beginning to tap into this data and leverage it into leads and opportunities.  It’ll be interesting to see what innovations come out of this in the near future.

Please feel free to comment below on where you think this area is going and/or how your business is currently leveraging this data.

Recently, I was meeting with a couple of executives from the Canadian Network for International Surgery (CNIS), when a rep from their largest funder, the Canadian International Developing Agency (CIDA) dropped in for a visit. The topic of the conversation was data and how CNIS was collecting it. What I learned from that meeting is that the Canadian Government is collecting serious amounts of data related to their work to ensure that the projects they are funding are competing effectively in today’s markets.

So if the Canadian Government is doing it, it must be a good idea, right?

We’ve all heard the age-old remark, “knowledge is power.” Well data is simply a building block of knowledge. When you can put data together in some kind of context, you get information, and with the right information you can build knowledge.

The World Wide Web started out as a large collection of data and the data was growing at break-neck speeds. At the time, a guy named Larry Page saw this collection of 10 million documents as an opportunity. He partnered with a guy named Sergey Brin, and out of all that mess of data came a system called PageRank and a company called Google. With acquisition of Internet services like Youtube and applications like Gmail, Maps, Street View and now Google+, Google has built itself into a data-collection empire.

Another example of a data-collection empire is Facebook. With more than 700 million active users worldwide, Facebook has been finding new and creative ways to come out with innovative products based on that data. Facebook has the largest database of faces on the planet – about 90 billion photos. With that data, they’ve been able to create a facial recognition technology that “suggests” tags to pictures they upload. In other words, if I upload six photos of my friend Andrew, Facebook may recognize his face (thanks to other tagged photos of him on their website) and “suggest” that I tag him in my photos. The next step for Facebook, in my mind, will be the ability to upload a picture of someone to Facebook and then find all the other pictures of that person on the Internet. Assuming Facebook can find a way to do that without breaking every privacy law in the book.

Facebook was in a similar situation as Google was when it first started. It had access to a ton of data and was able to convert that data into new opportunities.

Facebook Global Connections 2010

Data is now the new frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, and the amount of data in our world has been increasing exponentially. Companies capture trillions of bytes of information about customers, suppliers, and operations and with communication devices doing sales upwards of 5 billion units per year, the amount of information available is growing exponentially. Like other essential factors of production such as hard assets and human capital, data is increasingly becoming a major drive of modern economic activity, innovation and growth.

The explosion of strategies such as algorithmic trading coupled with regulatory compliance and increasingly complex financial engineering tools is leading to massive volumes of data within financial services organizations. In their industry, conducting business at the data level is no longer a practice for the future. In fact, I would argue that every industry is being required to compete at this level in some way.

This article also published in Corporate Recruiters Summer Newsletter 2011

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back in time and talk about the telephone. Telephone marketing started to become successful in the early 1950s. This was the time when DialAmerica Marketing Inc. completely dedicated their products and services to inbound and outbound telephone sales. In the ‘70s and 80’s, telemarketing took hold of the industry and cold calling became a major arsenal for the sales force. Since then, it has progressed down a slippery slope of unsolicited high-pressure sales techniques.

Unsolicited marketing calls at dinner time are now the bane of my existence. Email has a similar rep, but I’ll still put my name on the odd email newsletter signup that promises to send valuable content – now try convincing me to put my phone number on that same mailing list.

Unlike telemarketing, the Internet is regulated by companies that are constantly at battle with unsolicited marketing techniques, aka SPAM. Google gets paid for giving you good search results. Twitter, Facebook, and a myriad of content networks only have value for as long as they can keep users interested with relevant information. The same is required for a good social media marketing campaign. By offering relevant content, it is relatively painless to engage your target market. Being a convenient source of quality content with minimal disruptive behavior is the polar opposite of unsolicited telemarketing.

The bottom line to social media marketing is that although the odd Canucks hockey fan can quickly fill a timeline with #gocanucksgo (my bad), potential customers are finding valuable information about their friends, the buzz in their city, and the low-down on products, support, and service for your company – whether it’s from you or not.

As an example, I was recently talking with Dan Schubert Jr. – the owner of a plumbing company that was founded in 1978. Having used Yellow Page ads as their primary marketing tool up until now, the company has recently started investing in an online presence. Initially, Dan didn’t think he would see any serious impact from their online efforts for at least five years; however, the company’s website traffic is already climbing surprisingly fast.

Despite already having a company website, Dan decided to start a Twitter account: @sph_ltd. It seemed to be the quickest and least time-consuming way to publish information about the company. Instead of flooding the account with promos and coupons, Dan talks with customers about how their service call is going, thanks sub-contractors for the great job, posts a picture or two of job-sites, and talks about his family. I still see the odd ad here and there, but the majority is information that tells more about the person than the product. With that method, when promotions show up in their timeline, it is more of a treat than an advertisement. Here are a few examples:

sph_ltd Dan Schubert Jr.
The heavy equipment has moved onsite today, not sure how experienced the operator is though. http://yfrog.com/h4qrakahj

sph_ltd Dan Schubert Jr.
Why buy copper tees when you can make your own! Water mains for our Brookland project in #Surrey http://yfrog.com/h0boqpjkj

sph_ltd Dan Schubert Jr.
Mansfield Low-Flow Toilets on sale! $87.00 complete with seat! Limited Quantities available. http://bit.ly/hHZmnv #mission #abbotsford

Like any marketing tool, social media can take a lot of time and effort. This is a challenge for any company – particularly small business owners who never seem to have enough time or resources. With minimal effort, however, many business owners are starting to network online, on top of their regular offline networking like the Chamber of Commerce.

Let me end with a few tips to help you get started and/or moving forward more quickly:

• Take some time to look at what other people are saying in your area: what their interests are, how they talk to each other, what they use for their photo and how you can fit in but also stand out.
• Make sure you read up on the communication standards and understand the lingo of the social medium you are using. What are hashtags, likes, fans, followers, and tiny urls?
• If you don’t have a lot of time, pick one medium so that you can quickly start networking with your current and potential customers.
• Plan to be active on your social media accounts, indefinitely.
• Make sure you engage people: ask them questions about their posts, “like” their content, follow them back, and answer their questions.
• Advertise your account on your website, business cards, invoices, front door, and vehicles, and make sure staff and loyal customers are ready to spread the word.
• Experiment: each company has its niche and will have a unique combination of tools and techniques.

Finally, remember that it is less important how many followers or friends you start off with. A positive and friendly personality will steadily build your customer list. Tweet about your goldfish. I probably won’t think it’s interesting that they like flakes over pellets, but someone out there does.

For more information:
Twitter has put together a simple guide to help you understand what Twitter can do for business and Facebook also has some info in their help section. My Twitter account is @tim_steeves if you would like to follow and chat.

Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. Already the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project.

• Download Open Workbench
  

2: Redmine

Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database. It includes calendar and gantt charts to aid visual representation of projects and their deadlines.

• Download redmine

3: ProjectPier

ProjectPier is a Free, Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done Its function is similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows the freedom and scalability of self-hosting.

• Download ProjectPier

4: Codendi

Codendi is an open-source collaborative development platform offered by Xerox. From only one interface, it gathers, all the needed tools for software development teams: management and versioning of code, bugs, requirements, documents, reporting, tests etc. It is mainly used for managing software project processes.

Download Codendi

5: Trac

Trac is an open source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool. Trac allows hyperlinking information between a computer bug database, revision control and wiki content. It also serves as a web interface to a version control system like Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs.

• Download Trac

6: Project HQ

Project HQ is a collaborative open source project management tool, similar to Basecamp and activeCollab. Project HQ is built on open source technologies like Python, Pylons and SQLAlchemy and is fully database independent. Project HQ uses a structured workflow to assist you in managing your projects.

• Download Project HQ

7: Collabtive

Collabtive is a web-based project management software that is being published as Open Source software. The project was started in November 2007. It strives to provide an Open Source alternative to proprietary tools like Basecamp or ActiveCollab.

• Download Collabtive

8: eGroupWare

eGroupWare is a free open source groupware software intended for businesses from small to enterprises. Its primary functions allow users to manage contacts, appointments, projects and to-do lists.

It is used either via its native web-interface, making access platform-independent, or by using different supported groupware clients, such as Kontact, Novell Evolution, or Microsoft Outlook. It can also be used by mobile phone or PDA via SyncML.

• Download eGroupWare

9: KForge

KForge is an open-source (GPL) system for managing software and knowledge projects. It re-uses existing best-of-breed tools such as a versioned storage (subversion), a tracker (trac), and wiki (trac or moinmoin), integrating them with the system’s own facilities (projects, users, permissions etc). KForge also provides a complete web interface for project administration as well a fully-developed plugin system so that new services and features can be easily added.

• Download KForge

10: OpenGoo

It is a complete online solution focused on improving productivity, collaboration, communication and management of your teams. OpenGoo main features include document management, contact management, e-mail, project management, and time management. Text documents and presentations can be created and edited online. Files can be uploaded, organized and shared, independent of file formats.

• Download OpenGoo

11: ClockingIT

ClockingIT is a free Project Management solution, which helps your team stay focused and on top of things.

• Download ClockingIT

1. WebERP

It is a web based ERP system for small and mid sized Enterprise. The LAMP application has a stable code base and is packed with features suited for distributed businesses in wholesale and distribution. The features sales order, accounts receivable, user defined sales analysis, purchase orders, accounts payable, inventory management, general ledger, manufacturing, multi-language, multi-currency, complex tax system support. It also has multiple inventory locations with serial number and lot tracking facilities as well as full double entry accounting. In addition, it offers sales orders support for assemblies and kit-sets.

2. Openbravo

It’s one of the best open source ERP software for SMBs. Openbravo is a web-based program that was based on Compiere ERP program. It provides the entire status of a company that includes production information, inventory, customer information, order tracking and workflow information.

Openbravo accompanies wide ranging features that makes it easier to handle for end users. Some of its key features include dimensional reporting, alerts, email, keyboard navigation. It is easily configurable and tailors the existing functionality and business rules and is capable in adding many new functionality without any programming.

The ERP software offers better compatibility and sharing, allowing export of single file or a collection of files to Excel, CSV, or PDF directly from the application. Users can easily create third-party modules or plugins or even browser the directory and choose the shared functionality created by other users to install. It allows high scalability enabling deployment in single server or on a cluster of them, serving up to thousands of users. Any record in the system can be easily audited and traced to user who created it.

3. Compiere

Compiere is organized uniquely to avoid the duplication of information and the need for synchronization. With an innovative design Compiere allows easy customization of the application. Modules included in the ERP solution include Customer relationship management, Quote to Cash, Requisition-to-Pay, Partner Relations Management, Warehouse, Supply Chain Management, Performance Analysis, Double-entry Book-keeping, Work-flow-Management and Web Store.

4. xTuple

The xTuple PostBooks is an integrated ERP, CRM and accounting system, based on the xTuple ERP Suite.

Modules for ERP xTuple

• Accounting: general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, bank reconciliation, financial reporting
• Sales: quotes, order entry, sales reporting, shipping
• Product Definition: items, infinite-level bills of material (BOM)
• CRM: universal address book, incident management, opportunity management, to-do lists, project management
• OpenRPT: open source report writer
• Inventory: multiple locations, other advanced warehouse features
• Light Manufacturing: work orders, strong support for make to order
• Purchasing: purchase orders, receiving, vendor reporting

PostBooks is a cross platform application that runs equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac. It is fully internationalized with support for multiple tax structures, multi-currency, multilingual translation packs maintained by xTuple’s global community.

5.  OpenERP

This is a complete open source ERP software, designed to address the enterprise needs and processes. OpenERP integrates accounting, hr, sales, crm, purchase, stock, production, services management, project management, marketing campaign. It offers separate client and server components and XML-RPC interfaces. Open ERP is complete and modular system with 350 modules. The ERP software has a strong MVC architecture with an object database, a dynamic GUI, distributed server, flexible workflows, and customizable reports. The database is PostgreSQL and the server part is written in Python.

The key features of OpenERP include management accounting, financial accounting, inventory management, sales and purchase management, tasks automation, Human Resource Management, marketing campaigns, help desk, and point of sale.

Apart Linux, Windows and Mac interfaces, OpenERP has an web interface eTiny that is also available for the Turbogears web framework. OpenERP is widely  used by customers looking to automate their sales processes effectively.

6. Apache OFBiz

It is an Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that provides a suite of enterprise applications that integrates and automates several business process of an enterprise. The  framework offers a common data model and sophisticated business processes. There is a common architecture for all applications build around data, logic and process components. Apache OFBiz  is built on open source technologies and standards like Java,  Java Enterprise Edition (JEE), XML and SOAP.

Apache OFBiz comes with a wide range of functionalities  that include

• Accounting (agreements, invoicing, vendor management, general ledger)
• Asset Maintenance
• Catalogue and Product Management
• Facility and Warehouse Management
• Manufacturing
• Order Processing
• Inventory Management, automated stock replenishment etc.
• Content Management System (CMS)
• People and Group Management
• Project Management
• Sales Force Automation
• Work Effort Management
• Electronic Point Of Sale (ePOS)
• eCommerce
• Human resources (HR)

OFBiz introduces the concept of screens where each page typically represents a screen.  It’s architecture allows rapid customization of the application to a business needs without any new coding.

7. JFire

It is a comprehensive and flexible ERP solution for businesses of all size. The system offers enterprise processes with powerful analysis, reporting, and customization options. It has been designed to be highly customizable. JFire is a highly scalable system that can support small companies as well as giant companies with extensive user base, multi-currency & multi-language requirements. JFire is developed with the latest technologies such as J2EE 1.4, JDO 2.0, Eclipse RCP 3.3.

Key modules in JFire include

• Accounting
• Flexible Price Configurations
• Store Management
• Reporting
• Integration with external payment and delivery interfaces
• CRM

8. ERP5

This is a strong community that offers powerful ERP solution for small businesses. ERP5 is fully packed with features that includecustomer relationship management ( CRM), production management (MRP), supply chain management (SCM), product design management (PDM), accounting, human resources and e-commerce. For the small businesses, ERP5 has an Express edition which integrates ERP, CRM and KM funtionalities.

It offers a web based platform that can be used and configured for users and administrators through a browser. It provides an intuitive and polished user interface that makes an easy to understand ERP system.

9. Opentaps

It is a complete open source platform. Opentaps features a modern architecture that includes a complete full ERP and CRM solution.  The ERP solution also includes mobile connectivity and built-in business intelligence tools. Key modules in opentaps are Online Store, CRM, Warehouse Application, Financials, Purchasing and Administrative Applications

Although not the best of the lot opentaps serves as one of the best open source ERP software as an alternative to expensive and inflexible commercial ERP solutions. It would perfectly fit the replacement for in-house solutions that are difficult to maintain or extend, or as a starting point to build your unique business model and processes.

10. ADempiere

It is essentially a business suite that combines ERP, CRM and SCM support for business processes. ADempiere is an open-source ERP software that provides a framework for extending and customizing to meet business needs. Adempiere is developed in J2EE technology, especially using the JBoss application server. It’s database support is restricted to Oracle and PostgreSQL.

How do you improve revenue?  Increase sales…duh.  CRMs can increase sales so get one for the sales department, right?  Wrong.

The problem here is that sales people are generally not a process oriented group of people.  You see them out for dinner, on the phone talking with someone that might as well be a buddy they are going out for beers with later – they golf, email, and often don’t look like they are working very hard.  HOWEVER they are working hard.  Their job is to build relationships with the clients.  Doing this requires flexibility in their work schedule, which not only requires their appointments and lunch breaks to be flexible, but it requires that the tools they use to be quick side-notes in their day.  Phone and email follow you everywhere and so should the CRM; however the ability to push and pull information from the CRM needs to be as flexible as their schedule.  This tends to make sales people a much harder team to get to adopt a CRM.

The second group of people that are thought of when it comes to implementing a CRM is the marketing department.  Good marketing equals increased revenue.  Marketing is more of a process oriented job and tends to have routines and schedules that are much more orderly than sales.  While they still need to be flexible in their ability to put out a value proposition, they’re timelines and policies are more easily defined.  The marketing department tends to adapt to a CRM more easily than the sales department because often times a single workflow can accommodate many marketing campaigns and creating campaigns can become streamlined through the use of a CRM.  However, the marketing department already has routines and policies in place that allows them to do their job effectively and bringing in new tools will always have a bit of a learning curve.

Where a CRM is adopted the easiest and most effectively is with the service personnel.  They often have strict structures as to how to handle operations and management continually looks at how to improve policies to improve efficiencies so adoption rates tend to be highest with service personnel over the other departments.  Once a service team has converted to the new system there is an immediate improvement to customer service and operational efficiency.  The beauty of having the service team on-board quickly is that all the information that they enter into the system becomes available to the other departments – sales people can quickly and easily lookup customer inquiries and marketing can start to run reports on topics and trends.

By getting the service personell involved early on with the CRM implementation, the adoption rate for the sales and marketing departments is much higher.

CRMs can facilitate increased revenue, improved operational efficiences, and help provide outstanding customer service, but without input from senior management and their “signing up” to help meet numbers on ROI, deployment will not be as successful.  At the end of the day, senior managers will be responsible for the successful deployment of your company’s CRM initiative.  After all, once the CRM provider has implemented the system to meet your business’ requirements, it’s senior managements responsibility to make sure that your metrics are met and to provide feedback on where things can be improved for future enahancements and additions to your CRM system.

Not only is it important to ensure that your CRM is not deployed from the top-down, it’s equally important to ensure that Senior Managment are involved from start to finish!

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www.iTeamTech.ca

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During the initial phase of your CRM deployment, it’s extremely important to not only consider the requirements of senior managment, but to ensure that the CRM meets the needs of the sales and service personnel.  It has been said that users need to obtain 3 units of benefits from a system in order for them to see value in 1 unit of work that they a required to put into the system.  If this is not addressed, CRM deployments can quickly become unsuccessful.