Portfolio
Is Real-Time for Real? Are vendors truly enabling businesses to operate in real time?
Source: CRM Magazine Published: Mar 2003
It’s a familiar story by now: Dell Computer Corp.’s real-time order and fulfillment system has resulted in customer satisfaction in excess of 97 percent and has helped to propel Dell to the number one slot in the computer industry. This approach was not created by some magic spell that Michael Dell conjured; it is simply one step to becoming a real-time enterprise (RTE)–and it is possible at your company, too.
A real-time enterprise is able to share information with employees, customers, and partners in real time, anytime. This allows the company to instantly alert appropriate individuals, whether it be the company president, sales or marketing directors, or product managers, to changes in customer demand, inventory, competitive actions, and profitability.
The RTE is the stuff a CFO’s dreams are made of: being able to view a company’s books in a moment’s notice and instantly see a full range of financial results for the day, week, month, year, etc. It makes call center managers salivate when they imagine never putting a customer on hold, and their agents having immediate and simultaneous access to a caller’s history and analytical information that can aid in cross-selling and upselling. Sales executives thrill at the idea that they can anytime, in real time, know what is happening in their sales pipeline.
All these scenarios are possible, and will be, according to pundits of the real-time enterprise. “The real-time enterprise is the single most exciting movement in IT in the past decade,” says George Schussel, chairman of DCI Inc. And with so many vendors offering at least some type of real-time component in their product offerings, it is not hard to see why Schussel feels so strongly about the real-time enterprise.
