A New Conceptual Framework for Greater Success with Integration of E-CRM

This chapter examines how e-CRM has affected both organizational and individual behavior in a leading Canadian bank. The innovative and customer-driven culture of this bank pushed it toward early adoption of e-CRM technology. The findings emphasize the role played by many strategic and organizational dimensions in the success of e-CRM implementation. In fact, to make e-CRM efforts pay off, new business processes are required to achieve more effective and closer interactions with customers. The shift toward customer orientation needs to be supported by a shift in organizational objectives and processes. The results indicate that employees’ individual behavior successfully changed from a transactional to a relational perspective, and that training and coaching ensured a successful integration of e-CRM technology. Nevertheless, the employee reward and evaluation system, which should have been changed to leverage CRM impact, has surprisingly been forgotten. This deficiency is addressed by proposing a new framework for enhancing e-CRM effectiveness.

Innovations from Business Process Models

This chapter asserts that process models are an excellent platform for a continuous stream of innovations. Such models can illuminate opportunities for new products and services and for new ways of distributing products and services. These dynamic models make it possible to coordinate the efforts of multiple business partners in order to better serve customers with quality, speed, and responsiveness to their needs. There is increasing evidence that businesses using these models to discover opportunities have achieved a sustainable advantage over their competitors.

The Critical Success Factors of Web-Based Supply Chain Collaboration Adoption

This chapter aims to identify the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and outcomes of Web-based Supply Chain Collaboration (SCC). A total of 230 questionnaires were initially distributed to sample respondents of seven manufacturing firms in Jordan that use Web systems to collaborate with supply chain members. The results showed that top management support, IT infrastructure, training and education, business processes reengineering, trust among partners, open information sharing, and performance measurement are critical factors for Web-based SCC implementation success. In addition, this study revealed that Web-based SCC implementation is positively related to supply chain relationship quality, performance effectiveness, and performance efficiency.

Elements that Can Explain the Degree of Success of ERP Systems Implementation

The implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) is a risky and high cost action, even more when we are dealing with small and medium sized enterprises. Although many studies have shown the importance of paying attention to critical success factors in ERP implementations, there is still a high degree of failures and bad experiences around ERP implementations. Most literature has shown experiences of success and failure coming from large sized firms. But there is a lack of information of what has happened in the area of small and medium size firms, and for some economies, they are essential. In this chapter, we try to show a model containing the main elements that can better explain the degree of success and of failure in ERP implementations by providing examples mainly affecting to the circumstances of small and medium size firms. In our model, we propose 5 main groups of variables affecting final results in ERP implementations.

Business Process Management as a Critical Success Factor in EIS Implementation

Nowadays, the implementation of business process management modern tools in companies becomes a mater of acceptation of an effective organization management. The first ultimate precondition for achieving this goal is a properly structured company. An attention in the study is placed on business process reengineering due to preparing preconditions for smooth implementation of enterprise information system (EIS). Since there are differences between tools of business processes redesign and information systems development, then a main focus was on overcoming existing semantic gaps. With aim to solve this problem the specific modeling method has been used that was clear for company’s staff and usable for EIS designers. Used modeling approach was supported by QPR software.

Process Mapping for Electronic Resources

The number of electronic resources is continually growing and the processes associated with managing them are ever more complex. Consequently, completely new ways of managing these resources efficiently and effectively must be invented or borrowed from industries that also must manage complex processes. This chapter describes how a method generally employed in business and industry can be applied in managing electronic resource-related processes in libraries. Specifically, a technique called process mapping and its potential application to electronic resource management in libraries is described. Existing electronic resource management guidelines are conceptually linked to actual management situations. A case study is presented which is intended to illustrate the process.

Motivations and Trends for IT/IS Adoption

Over the past few decades, information systems and technologies have taken on a wide variety of roles within organizations, ranging from operational support to the strategic support of the company. Therefore, there have been significant changes in the motives for their adoption that are vital to understand to guarantee that investment is properly managed. With the purpose of identifying and characterizing the motivations currently behind the adoption of information technologies in large Portuguese companies, which systems the companies have been implementing, in which systems they intend to invest in short-term, and what is the current role of information technology within the organization, we carried out a study with the participation of several chief information officers. The findings of this study reveal that the reasons for adoption and the role that information systems and technologies play is evolving in Portuguese companies and that the adoption of certain types of systems like Enterprise Resource Planning systems is now consolidated, whereas the adoption of other systems like Business Intelligence systems should increase significantly in the near future.

A Conceptual Framework for Business Process Modeling in Virtual Organizations

Among different approaches in business processes modelling procedure are those in virtual and dynamic organizational environments. In this paper, a conceptual framework for modelling business processes in Virtual Organizations is suggested, by introducing Web Services technology. Web Services can be the business enabler for the new organizational form, which is particularly well suited to meet the demands arising from today’s turbulent changes in the firms’ environment. The proposed framework consists of several steps in a bottom-up approach, aiming to support the modelling and coordination of the complex and shared business processes in the examined environment.

Enterprise Resource Planning Under Open Source Software

Open source software is becoming more prevalent in businesses today, and while still a relatively immature offering, open source enterprise resource planning (OS-ERP) systems are becoming more common. However, whether or not an OS-ERP package is the right software for a given organization is a little researched question. Building on the current real options thinking about platform acquisitions, this chapter proposes the five most critical factors to consider when evaluating an OS-ERP package. To adequately do this, a great deal of detail about the current offerings in OS-ERP software is presented, followed by a review of the real options theory and thinking behind using these factors to evaluate OS-ERP options. The international implications of OS-ERP are presented in the “Future Trends” section.

Semantic Synchronization in B2B Transactions

Despite the development of e-business standards, the integration of business processes and business information systems is still a non-trivial issue if business partners use different e-business standards for formatting and describing information to be processed. Since those standards can be understood as ontologies, ontological engineering technologies can be applied for processing, especially ontology matching for reconciling them. However, as e-business standards tend to be rather large-scale ontologies, scalability is a crucial requirement. To serve this demand, we present our ORBI Ontology Mediator. It is linked with our Malasco system for partition-based ontology matching with currently available matching systems, which so far do not scale well, if at all. In our case study we show how to provide dynamic semantic synchronization between business partners using different e-business standards without initial ramp-up effort, based on ontological mapping technology combined with interactive user participation.