Part I of this blog post series talked about my encounter with BigMachines, a provider of slick software-as-a-service (SaaS) configure, price, and quote (CPQ)/quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions during my recent attendance of Gartner’s CRM Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona (US). Prior to analyzing recent events at BigMachines, Part I explained the general value proposition of on-demand Q2O and CPQ software solutions. Part II will continue with a discussion of recent developments at BigMachines.

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I recently attended Gartner’s CRM Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona (US). During the conference, I bumped into several old acquaintances who are working for various customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors. One of the vendors that attended the conference was BigMachines, a provider of inventive software-as-a-service (SaaS) configure, price, and quote (CPQ)/quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions.

Generally speaking, Web-based product configurators empower user enterprises to sell more, faster to their customers. These customers can be either other businesses or individual consumers.

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A recent blog post CRM for the Finance and Banking Industry – Part 1 by Gabriel Gheorghiu touched on a pain point of many of today’s enterprise IT environments. Due to the inconsistency of customer data amongst different systems in use, the bank employee “asked three or four of her co-workers for help, and took about 15 minutes” to simply change the address of one customer. As a matter of fact, the bank that Gabriel mentioned is not the only one in this situation. Recently at the Gartner Master Data Management Summit 2009, I learned from a case study that prior to the master data management (MDM) initiative, a large Canadian retailer had over 45 million domestic customers recorded in its various systems, even though the entire country has a population of less than 34 million. Read the rest of this entry »

How many different systems does a bank employee use when changing a customer’s contact information? The last time I moved and had to change my address, the bank employee used two systems, asked three or four of her co-workers for help, and took about 15 minutes to do it because the information from one system did not transfer right away to the other system. It goes without saying that this was not my best experience dealing with banks, but not the worst either. Actually, having implemented business solutions in the past, I find it quite amusing when it happens because it reminds me of the “good old days” when I used to get blamed for faulty systems. Read the rest of this entry »

The Utilities Industry

From TEC’s perspective and based on our understanding of the industry, the utilities industry consists primarily of the following service providers: electric power generators, network operators, customer power retailers, natural gas, steam supply, water supply, and sewage removal. All of these business segments have common criteria such as a mass customer service department and billing process, remote service supply or power generation, and high cost of asset owning and maintenance. Also, a big part of the utility business is project based as well. Below are some challenges the industry faces: Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I published a blog post called Customer Relationship Manufacturing. In this blog post, I described the symbiosis between the sales and production departments within a manufacturing company, mentioned some customer relationship management (CRM) vendors that seem to have adapted their products for the manufacturing industry, and I also promised I would get back to you with more information on these products. Read the rest of this entry »

Years ago, I took a job as an interviewer because I thought it would be interesting to talk to different people to find out what they thought on a variety of topics. I soon realized that people were not so eager to share impressions and give us their thoughts on products, events, etc. Some of the survey’s topics were not very pleasant, (e.g., writing a will and testament and preparing for unpleasant events like disability and death) and I understood quickly why people would get angry if we called while they were eating or sleeping. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started a lengthy discussion about the value proposition and parts-and-parcels of business process management (BPM), with an ensuing focus on Pegasystems (also known as Pega) as one of the leading BPM suite providers. Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 then analyzed in depth a number of the vendor’s “BPM secret sauce” ingredients.

Pega is one of the leading vendors in the overall BPM software market (it has been automating business processes for more than 25 years), and it has a strong presence in the financial services, insurance, and health care markets. The vendor has been most successful competing for customers whose businesses are characterized by a high degree of change, complexity, and size. Read the rest of this entry »

The old adage “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword” might have been best witnessed in the life and demise of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois (US). With its roots in the partner relationship management (PRM) or demand channel (chain) management (DCM) space, the company had first gobbled up a number of struggling PRM/DCM peers in the early 2000s. These mergers coincided with a time when there was a growing realization that the niche PRM market was not sustainable on its own.

Namely, the pundits saw the possible PRM future only as a part of a broader customer relationship management (CRM) suite or an even broader enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. Following up on these PRM acquisitions and some internal development of the quote-to-order (Q2O), content management, and master data management (MDM)/product information management (PIM) capabilities, Click Commerce eventually rounded out its Channel Management division sometime in 2005.   Read the rest of this entry »

To achieve success in today’s retail industry, retailers that are small to midsize businesses (SMBs) need to effectively meet their customers’ needs on time, with the right price, in the right quantity—and at the right place, with the right promotions. All of these things can be very overwhelming for a retailer. To get them, retailers require tools that support effective and precise operations. In this volatile global economy, every retailer is trying to beat the competition and win over the customer base. The winners in this race are the retailers that can provide customers the supreme (winning) combination of product, price, and customer service, and do it without affecting profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

The future is tomorrow’s present. Many have tried to predict it using silly or scientific methods, from chiromancy (palm reading), aleuromancy (fortune cookies), and other -mancies, to the three Ps (possible, probable, and preferable futures) and a W (or wildcard—low-probability events with a high impact on the future) used in futurology. Read the rest of this entry »

The departments within a company are like the children in a family: the owner, chief executive officer (CEO), or any other decision maker in the company, has a favorite department—in somewhat the same way that parents tend to have a favorite child. Not having children of my own, I did some research on the topic and found this very interesting article on a study about the burying beetle (Nicrophorus vespilloides), an insect that seems to have a family structure that is very similar to ours. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series provided a lengthy discussion about business process management’s (BPM’s) necessary parts and parcels, and the software category’s value proposition. At the end of the article, I mentioned my recent attendance of a witty presentation that attempted to explain the essence of BPM via some humor and metaphor of the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Namely, on March 23, 2009, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems’ founder and CEO, gave his luncheon keynote presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego. His theme was “Don’t just Survive… Capitalize.” Trefler begun by reminding the audience that in today’s turbulent economy we are all “not in Kansas anymore” and may just need some “ruby slippers” to find our way back home to profitability. If you have 14 minutes to spare, you can re-capture the spirit of the event here.

In the main part of his presentation in Part 2, Trefler maintained that to follow the “Yellow Brick Road,” which will lead any business to Oz (and back to profitability), requires three capabilities in particular, starting with the ability to directly capture business objectives into the BPM system by the business users. Read the rest of this entry »

The first part of this blog series described the opportunity for software as a service (SaaS) or on-demand enterprise applications, especially in the current difficult economic milieu. But before any vendor can embark on delivering a SaaS offering, it must understand several misconceptions about SaaS.

Part two then analyzed the first two of the top five SaaS assumptions that Gartner recently outlined in its research.  Read the rest of this entry »

A friendly colleague reminded me today that it’s been a while since I’ve posted news about our ongoing product rating updates. So here goes, continue reading if you’re evaluating software for any of the following types of systems.

• CRM
• ERP (manufacturing for discrete or process industries, ETO, distribution, and services industries)
• Financial systems
• PLM

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