J.D. Edwards Intros New Suite
J.D. Edwards today unveiled a product suite for customer relationship management. The software,called Customer Service Management System, is aimed at manufacturers whose products require
post-sales servicing and support, such as medical equipment or photocopy machines.
The CSMS application is integrated with J.D. Edwards' OneWorld ERP software. Company officials
say the new module will let users move more data across the enterprise--and thus give them a
single point of reference for customer contact and interaction, from manufacturing to
distribution to call center. "If a customer calls up with a problem, the manufacturer will now
have a complete view of that customer's service history and will also have visibility into the
spare parts needed to fix the problem," says Michael Schmitt, a senior VP at J.D. Edwards.
New CSMS functionality includes: call-center management designed specifically for high-volume
calling and online access to customer and product information; installed-base management,
which lets customers track information about all manufactured and sold items; service-contract
management, which lets users manage all service contracts from the same system and thus
avoid redundant data entry, and service- order management, which ensures that all internal and
external operations that comprise a service order are easily monitored and executed.
J.D. Edwards isn't the first ERP vendor to unveil plans for customer management. SAP formally
unveiled its sales force automation and customer management initiative last week, while Oracle
and Baan have been aggressively targeting this market since the beginning of the year. But unlike
its competitors, J.D. Edwards has no plans to sell CSMS as a standalone module.
Peggy Wheeler, an analyst with IT advisory firm AMR Research says it makes sense for the big
ERP vendors to attack the customer-management market. "Right now, most companies have
homegrown customer systems or piecemeal functionality from a bunch of different vendors," she
says "This makes it difficult to pull information together from across the enterprise and get a
complete view or your customer environment." She adds that if ERP vendors are offering products
that promise to easily integrate customer information with manufacturing and financial data,
then users should take a long, hard look at them.
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