Effective CRM And SCM For Shoes Of Prey - Essay Recommendations.

Benefits of CRM System

You are a team of junior consultants, specialising in Information Systems, at a leading international consulting firm. Your firm aims to increase its new small businesses client base with high growth potential. Your Senior Vice President (SVP) for business development has requested your team to prepare a proposal that analyses 1 potential client (a client of your choosing), to include in list of potential clients in the small business consulting division. The SVP business development criteria outlines the following: 1. The Australian business should be relatively new - operating for 10 years or under. 2. The business should have both an online and offline presence (ie website/mobile application and a physical shop/store/office)

Knowing that your team specialises in technology solutions, the SVP has asked you to prepare a proposal to advise him on the potential of advising the small business you have chosen. Prepare a proposal with the following structure:

1. Undertake an analysis of your client and it’s environment – product/service, goals, strategies, business activities and operations. Specifically, provide your understanding of how the business positions itself in relation to its competition in the industry based on your analysis. (20%)

2. Based on your analysis of the current state of your chosen business’ in part 1, explain how the business you have chosen could improve their operations and competitiveness by leveraging on at least two specific technology solutions - (Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Business Intelligence (BI), Mobile technology, or Social Media solutions). For this part, you should first identify, based on your research and analysis in Part 1, the four most pressing areas in your chosen business that require attention. You should then outline how the specific capabilities of the combination of technology solutions you have chosen, could help in addressing these areas of concerns. Your recommendation should clearly explain the impacts on specific processes and strategies. (25%)

3. Identify and describe at least three main IS/IT security, ethics and privacy issues that the business should take into account when leveraging on your chosen technology solutions. (10%)

4. Recommend specific commercially available IT products/solutions that your chosen business should adopt. Your recommendation should be based on your analyses in Parts 1, 2, and 3. It should clearly justify the capabilities of the particular vendors and that they are the best choice for the business. This means that you need to compare your chosen vendors against their main competitors in the market. (25%)

Benefits of CRM System

Shoes of Prey is a small business in Women shoes manufacturing that started its business in 2009. The Company expanded its market in 2014 with lot of aspirations but facing severe challenges in its market orientation due to the intense competition in the Shoe manufacturing sector by big business organisations like Puma, Nike and Adidas. The strategic pricing strategy and the supply of the raw materials are considered to be the biggest factors that created obstacles to the global business of Shoes of Prey. In this context, the report is going to illustrate two recommendations that will cater strategic advantage to the business of Shoes of Prey. The paramount focus is on the effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and an efficient Supply Chain Management (SCM) framework.

Recommendation1. CRM System

The purpose of a CRM system is to provide best services to the customers through better communication with the customers and interaction. The system is predominantly based on integrated application engineering flexible to configure, customize and personalise the customer relationship items (Khodakarami and Chan 2014). In this regard, it will be an effective framework to choose the Collaboration CRM System.

As far as the Collaboration CRM system is concerned, it is a hybrid mechanism of both the operational and the analytical framework. The operational perspective facilitates a better operational environment that helps the salespeople to enhance their productivity and effectiveness. In addition to this, the operational aspect includes applications for sales, marketing and service. Moreover, the customer facing process in also incorporated into the framework so that the company can also get adequate information about each product and the customer satisfaction (Navimipour and Soltani 2016). On the other hand, the analytical model is more dedicated to deal with one to one customised marketing programs. It can be argued that the analytical model incorporates the elements of campaign, market segment, key account and product group (Tzokas et al. 2015). The process is more committed to the strategic planning process for an organisation in order to involve more customers into the fold and retain the existing ones. Most interestingly, it can be seen that both the framework in terms of the operational and the analytical process have a keen purpose to develop a better mechanism that is intricately serve the purpose of the customer relationship management. 

In response to this, the Collaboration CRM is identified as more effective and smooth process dealing with not only the customers but also succeeded to widen up the process by fostering a relationship framework involving both the customers and the organisational staffs. As a result of that it becomes able to develop a collaborative approach that provokes the organisation to set a better customer relationship management. Besides this, this hybrid mechanism requires a closed-loop CRM to execute the customised marketing campaigns (Nyadzayo and Khajehzadeh 2016). Furthermore, this process also generates a process of measurement on the effectiveness of the mechanism and identifying any glitches regarding the Collaboration CRM practice.

Collaboration CRM System

Recommendation2: SCM System

According to Brandenburg et al. (2014), it can be argued that supply chain management is one of the most important aspect that helps an organisation to sustain in the intense competitive market. Moreover, in his research Genovese et al. (2017) pointed out that with the course of change in the customer needs and the operational process of products. As a result of that it requires a next generation and advanced Supply Chain Management model that is rallied with the objectives of Shoes of Prey. In this regard, the next generation has some specific characteristic features. The characteristics are as follows,

This is related to the transportation and distribution of the supply and logistics. In this context, the role of the new SCM is to link all the players and activities in such a manner so that it will take less time to convert the raw materials into products and delivering the products to the customers in time (Dubey et al. 2017).

Digitisation creates a strategic advantage to the SCM mechanism by enhancing the speed of order to delivery. As a matter of fact, it has a great impact on the business to business, business to consumer and business to employee framework that helps to foster a better SCM model (Azadi et al. 2015). Simultaneously, the process also involves intelligent supply chain that connotes the continuous use of data through the development of mobile communication and wireless technology.

It is significantly important for the supply chain management to procure a process that meets all the requirements of the customers. Moreover, resolving the customer centric problems in short span of time is also considered to be one of the major aspect on which the SCM model puts focus on. In this context, it is pivotal for the model to incorporate the knowledge and data regarding the customers, their problems and demands and analyse all the factors in order to foster better service (Genovese et al. 2017). However, the model provides information not only to serve the purpose of the supply chain management only but also share the customer related information with other department with the motive to develop an overall quality service providing framework. The opportunities and limitations in the supply chain model are also included in the model so that it can mitigate the issue and maintain continuous supply process.

Conclusion

In a conclusion, it can be argued that for the expansion of business of Shoes of Prey, it is very important to get acknowledged with the IT driven frameworks that provide strategic advantage to the company. Therefore, the report rightly pointed out the process of shaping the CRM and SCM model based on a more advanced and strategic framework so that it can deliver advantages in the future business orientation. However, there is also the social media marketing aspect that can be utilised as well but the report specifically focuses on the new implementation IT models rather than the existing measures. From that point of view, it can be stated that the report is quite effective and relevant for further market expansion of Shoes of Prey. 

References

Azadi, M., Jafarian, M., Saen, R.F. and Mirhedayatian, S.M., 2015. A new fuzzy DEA model for evaluation of efficiency and effectiveness of suppliers in sustainable supply chain management context. Computers & Operations Research, 54, pp.274-285.

Brandenburg, M., Govindan, K., Sarkis, J. and Seuring, S., 2014. Quantitative models for sustainable supply chain management: Developments and directions. European Journal of Operational Research, 233(2), pp.299-312.

Dubey, R., Gunasekaran, A., Papadopoulos, T., Childe, S.J., Shibin, K.T. and Wamba, S.F., 2017. Sustainable supply chain management: framework and further research directions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 142, pp.1119-1130.

Genovese, A., Acquaye, A.A., Figueroa, A. and Koh, S.L., 2017. Sustainable supply chain management and the transition towards a circular economy: Evidence and some applications. Omega, 66, pp.344-357.

Khodakarami, F. and Chan, Y.E., 2014. Exploring the role of customer relationship management (CRM) systems in customer knowledge creation. Information & Management, 51(1), pp.27-42.

Navimipour, N.J. and Soltani, Z., 2016. The impact of cost, technology acceptance and employees' satisfaction on the effectiveness of the electronic customer relationship management systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, pp.1052-1066.

Nyadzayo, M.W. and Khajehzadeh, S., 2016. The antecedents of customer loyalty: A moderated mediation model of customer relationship management quality and brand image. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 30, pp.262-270.

Tzokas, N., Kim, Y.A., Akbar, H. and Al-Dajani, H., 2015. Absorptive capacity and performance: The role of customer relationship and technological capabilities in high-tech SMEs. Industrial Marketing Management, 47, pp.134-142