On any manufacturing chief exec's wish list, integration between disparate parts of the IT department's empire is at or near the top.  Manufacturers don't have money to waste on applications that don't talk to each other, and they're becoming very vocal indeed about the need to get a return on the IT investments they've already made.

That's one reason for a resurgence of industrial interest in customer relationship management (CRM).  Once the bad boy of enterprise applications, today the picture has been transformed.  Working with Benchmark Research, Sage's analysis of the manufacturing software market shows that 20 per cent of mid-market manufacturers - a higher proportion than ever - plan to invest in CRM over the next year.

CRM leading integration

A key reason for this is the integration CRM provides, the creation for both suppliers and customers of a single, accurate view of any business.  These systems build a single view of customers and suppliers in the operation's IT systems, and they do this by linking 'back-office' financial and other systems with 'front-office', customer-facing applications like CRM itself.

The greatest promise of this kind of integration is to eliminate expensive, time-consuming and error prone rekeying of information from one system to another.  To end the need to tell the customer you'll phone back with the information they need - providing it when convenient for you not when it's convenient for the customer.

And it delivers that promise.  The canny manufacturer knows that, if these applications had any remaining rough edges, tough retailing and insurance users will have taken the sandpaper to them.  What's more, as long as they use standards-based integration tools to build on what they already have, no adopter of CRM-based integration need face the trauma of getting rid of their old systems.

All companies have customers

Manufacturers of all sizes are also keen to cash in on the huge investments that no-nonsense non-manufacturing companies - in retailing, the financial sector and elsewhere - have long made in CRM to gain its generic returns.  Every business, in whatever sector, has customers.  CRM's whole rationale is to iron out the slips, inefficiencies and failures of communication that all too often turn a customer into an agent for the opposition.

But though any well-implemented CRM system will undoubtedly give order-of-magnitude improvements in the accuracy of the data used throughout any organisation, the benefits available also cover sector-specific benefits to industrial users.  Sales staff with immediate access to first-hand information about production schedules and capacity constraints can offer customers reliable delivery dates.  And further effiencies flow from making internal warehousing, shop floor systems and external supply-chain systems part of the integration loop.

Carefully interpreted CRM delivers a valid, dependable guide to which customers will convert enquiries into orders within a chosen period.  This gives manufacturers undreamt-of access to a clear and reliable picture of the future-order pipeline.  Fed into a planning system, the output of such a forecasting tool can optimise the master production schedule (MPS) and support materials requirements planning (MRP) and production scheduling a week or a month ahead.  The same systems can maintain records of supplier and vendor purchasing status, quality and delivery performance.

Allied to business intelligence

The case for this kind of integration becomes overwhelming when the technique is allied to business intelligence (BI).  BI tools deliver an overall view of business performance by bringing together multiple systems into one.  In effect they create a new instrument panel for the business.  Who are your most profitable customers by spend, by product or by region?  The tools tell you at once.  What will be the effect of a single price change on your business, at once.  No need to guess.

Clare Perry can give you chapter and verse.  She is the Northampton-based West Europe IT & Systems Manager at Curtis Instruments, a US-owned company which designs, manufactures and supplies electric-vehicle speed control and battery measurement technology.  Curtis's sites worldwide generate annual sales of $120m to big retailers, and suppliers to Caterpillar, Toyota and other global names.  Clare says: "We want to come across to our customers as one company, so we need the same standards and the same systems, which will all talk to each other." 

The Curtis solution is a SalesLogix CRM system closely coupled to Sage Line 500 ERP and other systems for production scheduling, financials and back-office functions.  "It provides us with easier reporting and better monitoring," says Clare.  "We know how many customer visits our [sales] people are undertaking each month, and what they're doing.

"Information on order status, issue resolution and anything else is easily accessible, which is particularly important for our remote people. Their information is now updated every time they log on, which means they can answer queries and progress chase far more effectively."

Curtis pays its sales staff commission on customer visits as well as on sales and margin.  "Previously, we had to enter information on three business systems.  Now it's a single, integrated set-up - and data goes to corporate, too," she adds.  Not only are the remuneration calculations much easier but the company can also identify and act on common issues quickly.

In combination, Clare says, Curtis's systems provide the quality, accuracy, consistency and availability of information essential for a company which, like Curtis, is determined to grow.

Horses for courses

Though CRM is right for any size of business, the system that's right for General Motors won't be right for a job shop.  A better bet for the small manufacturer is a shrink-wrapped, PC-based contact-management system to gather all its customer and supplier data in one place, log when they were last contacted, and prompt when they need to be called again.

Mid-market tools for those further up the supply chain can still be an 'out of the box' package which provides integration to XML or EDI based message-exchange sytems.  Still larger or more specialist manufacturers like Curtis need more configurable solutions, where a configurable sales force automation system stores and manages interactions with all current customers and sales prospects. 

As for Sage itself, CRM is now indispensible.  Sage serves over three million customers worldwide, 500,000 in the UK alone.  To do that we use a distributed SalesLogix system to give us instant information not just about our customers, but also about our suppliers and business partners.