Supporting our expanded concept of CRM can push CRM software hard – on occasion very hard. Integrating front and back office workflow and information flow related to customers can be a challenge – and more often than not involves extending software beyond the CRM sphere. In fact, in extreme cases the back office could have more CRM licenses than sales, marketing and service combined. And fully automating “in the seams” front/back office functions as well as very particular sales, service and marketing requirements takes a very high level of configurability found in very few CRM systems.
That’s why I was grinning from ear to ear when I left a Pivotal user conference last week after seeing where Pivotal had taken V6.0. Although Optima and Oncontact both have been available to our clients needing to operate well beyond CRM boundaries, both are niche players, and it’s great having a widely implemented, mainstream system join them.
The difference between Pivotal 5.9 and 6.0 is the proverbial night and day. V6.0 is far more extensible and adaptable, without many of the accustomed CRM system limitations. And from a process design perspective, V6.0 offers process support potential well beyond the norm. In fact, a later point release will include workflow mapping capabilities.
I feel like we have nother arrow in the quiver, now. Although true to our history, HYM will remain software agnostic.
A quick side note: one of our past clients running Pivotal 5.9 was there to evaluate upgrade advisability. As it happens, many of the ideal process flows we recommended four years ago had to be labeled “wait for technology to catch up.” Pivotal caught up, creating a wealth of further process improvement opportunities for this client.
At the end of the morning session, my client, who’s stuck with a grade D ERP system that’s still around because there’s not much choice in the vertical, told me he wants to explore offloading ERP functionality to Pivotal 6 – to the point of being able to replace ERP with a much simpler financial package. That’s telling.
