Take a test – K3 Business Accelerators Score Card
K3 has developed a simple score card designed to be completed in 5 minutes, will attempt to measure your own business effectiveness against the five K3 Business
Accelerators initiatives in order to try and identify gaps in you systems and processes. The outcome of which is design to help your organisation improve its market effectiveness, performance and top-line growth.
This is something we encourage customers to do before embarking on a CRM deployment. Not only is it a quick way of building the basis of a business case for your CRM project, but it can also be used to provide the cost justification and return on Investment plan.
Put simply, it is the science of attracting and retaining profitable customers by placing the customer at the heart of the enterprise. CRM is a mechanism for developing strategies and processes to treat customers as individuals and not as numbers.
Summary of issues surrounding the manufacturing sector
These are some of the most common issues we’ve found in the manufacturing sector which CRM is designed to address.
Customer information held in multiple databases and locations (data silos) thus requiring excessive administration to keep up-to-date and difficult to provide consistent reporting. |
Poor management of staff working in multiple locations |
Poor Communication e.g. pre and post sales customer services often kept in the dark |
Little or no control of agents and overseas representation |
Limited capabilities for measuring customer responses and tracking leads |
Poor recording of Sales activities e.g. calls, diary management, letters, faxes and e-mails |
Limited facilities to provide accurate sales quotations based on standard product and sub-assemblies and manufacturing routes |
Inconsistent way of generating quotations in a common format |
Unable to easily share sales quotations and technical requirements with other parts of the organisation |
Sales forecasting not integrated, often managed by spreadsheets, bespoke database, contact management systems which are non integrated |
Poor sales performance reporting and forecasting, such as forecasting monthly & quarterly out turns difficult to quantify and often production struggles to disseminate accurate sales forecasts |
Difficult to plan resources, update suppliers and critical lead times resulting in higher levels of finish goods stock, WIP & materials |
Pressure on your customer performance, lead times, product costs which potentially opens the door to competition. |