Order Management – General introduction

Among the other Oracle Siebel CRM modules, Order Management is one of the most used and requested. This is due to its employment in the sales process, across quote and order management processes. The advantages offered by Siebel CRM are the integration with back-office applications (for products, availability, orders, credit check, taxation, etc.) and automation (through various customizable workflows), as well as flexible support throughout the sales process.
Before getting to use it in the Sales process, it is important to prepare the grounds for Order Management usage. As a first step, it is necessary to set up a series of elements and their characteristics (not all of the following are mandatory): Accounts and Contacts, Salespeople, Products, Pricing and Catalogs, Shipping Information, Tax Calculations, Payment Terms, Inventory Locations, Order Types, Order Statuses, Product Selection Favorites, Activity Plan Tempaltes, Availability to Promise, Asset-Based Ordering.

There are also several changes to perform in the application such as Activating Workflows, customizing the Sales, Quote and Order processes, customizing the List of Values, etc.
Integrations with the Back-Office applications could be necessary as well, depending on the infrastructure. Among them:

• Quote and Order process integration assures correct quote/order status and communication among front and back-office departments;
• Product Availability - information is retrieved from third party applications;
• Credit-Check – indicates if the customer has enough credit for purchasing the product ;
• Taxation – facilitates tax calculation based on organization and customer location (taxation legislations).

Creating and managing the catalog establishes the structure of products and services in order to facilitate access definition and navigation. It employs Catalog, Category, Subcategory and Product elements to establish hierarchies.

Presentations can be adapted by customizing the Display Templates and attribute search can be implemented to facilitate finding of products based on their characteristics.
For facilitated products up and cross-selling, the Product Recommendations need to be set in place. Messages are created and related to products in order to indicate to the salesperson possible up-sell and cross-sell products. A score is used for categorizing recommendations based on their importance in comparison with other recommendations, facilitating viewing and decision of what recommendation to make.
One of the competitive characteristics of a company is its approach to the sales process. Oracle Siebel CRM supports variations in the quotes and order processes facilitating flexible adaptation thus the creation of competitive advantages. As part of the Order Management implementation process it is necessary to define and map such processes in order to construct the best application support. In this step it is also very important to take into consideration the company strategy, the difference between it and the “real” selling process carried on by the employees, and decide the best way to suit both, assuring change management and user-acceptance.

A special type of approach to ordering is the asset-based ordering process. It allows companies to create assets from client’s orders, to create quotes for new products and services based on existing assets, create quotes to modify existing products and services, modify existing open orders, manage an existing service and gain visibility into the asset life cycle.
Order Management is a complex Oracle Siebel CRM module.

Dear friend, communicating means responsibility

Hi all, for the second time I am posting about a non-CRM related argument. Yes, because at the end some principles are universal and involve everything, CRM as well.
I am just going to put a comment I made on a video by Anthony Robbins, a guru in so called "inspirational life coaching" ( http://tonyrobbinstraining.com/46/tiny-changes-mean-huge-results) and a person that in any case I admire for the results he achieved and still helps the others achieving.
He's trying to raise up the spirit of people in this moment of crisis. The intention is good and at the beginning I even appreaciated it, but maybe for the first time, thanks to the crisis itself, I am realizing how dangerous certain approaches can be if they are not correclty driven. By a matter of fact, my comment to the video has been "censored". Fortunately we live in an almost free world, so I decided to post it here...

Hi Tony,
this time I wanna play the devil's advocate. Why? Because I am afraid the situation requires different models (whatever the field) and critic analysis about past 20 years. Moreover because we need to challenge ourselves and this requires not always saying "yes!".
First example: in the golf game case, few millimeters do the difference if you're putting a lot of energy in your shot, as the target is far away. But what about if you give a soft shot as you're close to the hole? Surely the difference is smaller, as your shot is not amplified by the long distance. For sure if you hit softer you are more precise, right? well, paradoxically, it could be that a player making soft shots arrives
first to the target than another one hitting the ball like a mad, considering they have the same low preciseness, no? Same rules, “strange” winner.
Why there's the need, above all for the first shots, to strike hard?
Because the golf game rules tell you that if you arrive before you win. Well,
what if the rules were different?
Second example: it's true, few millimeters make the difference between a beautiful and an ugly face, but.. did I say beautiful and ugly? what am I basing on to state this? on commonly accepted parameters.

What if these parameters were different? And, above all, should I put all this attention to these few millimeters doing the difference for the commonly accepted CURRENT trend?
I got where you wanna point but please understand my argument. Little daily applied changes and "corrections" make the life trip go in the direction we pursue, yes. But it depends on HOW you do it, on some FUNDAMENTALS you should have and on the MODELS the society is basing on.
Many financial and economic crashes have been driven by people that certainly applied strong believes, strong self-motivation, auto-determination and focus. Much focus.
But on what? And on which basis? I think too much on pure “success”, money and with very weak basis. What I am saying it’s that maybe it’s no more time for such kind of approaches if not driven by a good method, strong fundamentals and new models.

Maybe people are unmotivated and with the “head down” for good reasons, because they don’t like what they see and how they live, or the society tells them they have to live if they want to be “accepted” or be cool. Maybe it’s some society rules that should change and not people keep smiling and pushing on things, whatever it takes and, above all, driven by the same hidden interests?
There’s so much responsibility in communicating.

Doing some analysis, all this is probably true also for what CRM is facing as a corporate initiative, in this crisis situation.