Customer relationship management
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a powerful tool for the assessment and analysis of all the information regarding the customers. The primary tasks of CRM software suites are recording, processing and storing data that include customer preferences, tendencies, and trends, response to various strategies implemented by the company, and integrate the resulting information into other instruments to increase the efficiency of the company. The obtained data can be used to project future sales, to monitor and appropriately react to the feedback from clients, to organize logistics, and to create invoices, among other things. Sales Force, Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle comprise the majority of available CRM tools on the market. The data that is produced is strictly standardized, which allows to implement it throughout the business.
Enterprise Resources Planning
ERP, or enterprise resource planning, tackles the other side of the business. Basically, ERP assesses the inbound data by essentially the same process as CRM. The ERP mainly monitors accounting, supply chain, human resources, sales, marketing, manufacturing process, logistics, warehouse, and others. The analysis provided by ERP allows for timely projections, analysis of shortages, and detection of vulnerabilities created by improper functioning of certain departments. The data is standardized in the same manner as with CRM, and all the principles are essentially the same. In fact, the two systems are often used together in conjunction and are usually integrated to the point when they are viewed as a single system instead of two interacting tools. The ERP software is also provided by SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, which further simplifies the integration.
Social Media Information Systems
The emergence of social networks has introduced several new phenomena of unprecedented magnitude and scope. One of them is the Social media information systems or the algorithms that define and analyze the principles of distribution and sharing of the information inside the network. While used primarily for scientific purposes, SMIS has been successfully implemented in various aspects of marketing, mainly for market research, trend monitoring, and other end user-centered inquiries. As this almost uniformly coincides with the scope of CRM and, to a smaller degree, ERP, SMIS presents a great source of raw and sometimes partially processed data to be utilized by both tools. Thus, the balanced use of CRM, ERP and SMIS allows for timely, precise and reliable information for analysis and planning of company strategies and, subsequently, maximized efficiency.