Onyx Software Inc. is trying to move up the customer-relationship-management food chain. The company has embedded business-process-management technology it acquired last year from Visuale Inc. into its core CRM platform, and this month it began building reporting capabilities from Cognos Inc.'s ReportNet business-intelligence application into its offering, too. Last week, the company said it's shifting its focus to help companies automate and evolve their customer-facing processes.

The moves give the company an advantage over other enterprise CRM application providers, Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone says. "One of the weaknesses in CRM has been that it hasn't been a business-process engine," she says.

Business-process outsourcer Metron North America Ltd. has invested $700,000 in Onyx software and wants to tap Onyx's new reporting capabilities to work on its customer-facing processes and, it hopes, double its $300 million in annual revenue. Its deployment of Onyx, which went live in December, is the company's first foray into CRM, VP of finance Robert Williams says. Now Metron has visibility into more sales-related details through a single reporting interface.

Metron also has seen benefits by integrating Onyx with a new call-dispatch system. When a call comes in, all the customer's information is presented to the agent, resulting in a 30% gain in efficiency.