ERP beats Excel at CRM/2

I interrupt the blogs from the holiday channel to write a little more about ERP and CRM. When I started work on improving our implementation, I discovered that the ERP program was more sophisticated than I had appreciated; I also discovered that almost no one (including myself) had been using the program correctly.

What is one of the basic tenets of ERP? Every datum should be recorded only once. But due to lack of knowledge, people had been entering the same data time after time. I refer to data about contacts; an architect might be a contact person for twenty different customers - our users had created twenty different records for the same architect, all with slightly differing details.

I swiftly discovered that there are, in fact, two kinds of contact: internal contacts (a one to one relationship with a customer) and external contacts (a one to many relationship with customers). Although the contacts are maintained in the same database table, the way that they are linked to the customers is different. Almost no one knew this. 

So my first job - which took almost a week - was to find all these duplicate records and correct them. This was a very time consuming job, as not only had I to identify which would be the 'main' record for the architect (and ultimately, the only record), I also had to correct all the records (opportunities, price quotes, orders, projects, delivery notes) which used the duplicate records. When I understood the problems facing me, I wrote a few tools which would help me correct the data - these saved a great deal of time. But still I had to wade through reams of incorrect data.

After finishing the above, I then gave a training session to all involved about how to work in the new style. I also check all new contacts which are created on a daily basis.

The contact information is, of course, the great advantage of ERP over Excel; while Excel might be able to maintain the specific data of each contact, there is no way that Excel could know with which entities the contact person is involved.