Are you planning to leave Siebel for some other technology? .. Think twice...

As e-Up is attending the Oracle Open World 2014, today I attended the “Siebel CRM - the future of Siebel, Strategy and Roadmap for the World’s most complete CRM” session.

I have to say that after years of frustration, now Siebel customers could relax about the future of their multi-years investment, if Oracle keeps its promises.

As I have had the opportunity to underline in other occasions, the strategy towards what they now define as the most complete CRM solution in the World, has been ambiguous - to say the least.

During these days, I have met Siebel customers really expressing years of frustration towards a non clear statement of direction, making confusion even between going to Open UI or Oracle Cloud (by the way - someone still talks about Oracle Fusion applications and you would be surprised by who is doing so..).

What we have been experiencing in these years is a constant and continuous penetration of the cloud buzzword in the business applications scenario. Cloud is cool, On-Prem is obsolete... Or so they say.

So we have seen Siebel customers abandon their investment for other technologies, quite always towards cloud based ones as Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM (as in the famous IBM case). But are we really sure they did the best long-term decision?

Siebel customers are still very concerned about their commitment to their Siebel solutions and they are not sure if continuing investing in it is a winning strategy.

If until today I had my own idea about the right choice for big corporations, but I could not reassure them (at the end of the day, we do not own the future of Siebel as a technology) now I can honestly say those customers that they should be relaxed and not too much worried about the future of their CRM platform.

What really changes between Cloud and On-Prem solutions is the commitment you are giving to handling your own data and servers. If taking care of your servers and data is more a burden than an advantage, then you should probably think about a strategy to get rid of it and find someone to take care in your place or change the entire application paradigm and move everything to the cloud.

If you are not part of this group, then I don’t think you should be concerned about not being yet on the cloud. As technology is improving, as network speed and bandwidth are increasing, the difference among the different paradigms is really more and more a keyword, marketing one. But I will return on this in the future, discussing how we simply deliver to you new solutions like e-Tools for Siebel.

What I want to give you is really my impression about the market and my opinion about the most intelligent way to face the future.

My impression is that someone has tried to put on-prem solutions as Siebel apart, but customers were not ready or not willing to follow the flow.

The consequent lack of customers satisfaction and the evolution of technologies I mentioned before brought us where we stand today, with Oracle telling us they are going to commit to Siebel for the most foreseeable future with a bunch of new implementations I am going to list.

Again, if you are not in the group of customers that consider handling data and application servers a burden, you should not really worry about not being on the Cloud. Why? Because it will come, step by step, and I think you should let Oracle worry about that, not yourself.

A first example is the integration of the new Oracle Cloud solutions with Siebel, that will extend your on-prem CRM features with cloud based ones, without the need for you to completely disrupt years of implementation.

This is part of the Oracle CX strategy, that is offering you the possibility of choosing new cloud solutions such as Oracle Marketing, Oracle Sales, CPQ, Commerce, Service and Social to be integrated with the Siebel core.

Numbers show us today that 84% of Siebel customers are either on 8.1 or 8.2 version; that means that - from now on - things should be much simpler in terms of innovation and upgrades and the official roadmap now clearly shows 2022 in the time line. So commitment is there... As for the quality of the products, I cannot really say and I don’t want to make everything appear so easy as it has not been in the past years for many upgrades (really painful for many customers).

Open UI, firstly release 2 years ago, is now not just a reshaping of the user interface; it is really a change of technology, making sure that the Siebel application is not only more likable for the users, but ready to be run on all the latest devices. IP 2014 will make sure that there will be a complete responsive design UI, so that no development is needed to adapt the user interface to different devices. Using both tablets and smart phones? Then the UI will automatically shrink or expand to fit to your device screen.

The third part representing an update and new life to Siebel is represented by mobile solutions: there will be now the possibility to directly download the mobile application from the App Store and the synchronization famous pain points will be approached (and hopefully solved) with 3 different options (complete synchronization, upload or download). The disconnected application will therefore see new life with an enhanced solution, together with a new version of CRM desktop, completely integrated with Outlook 2013 and Lotus Notes 8.5.3.

Together with the standard mobile application, new ad-hoc vertical mobile solutions (phone or tablet) have been introduced: for the moment Communication, Life Sciences (particularly for e-detailing) and Financial Services will have completely dedicate mobile applications that will be integrated with Siebel (Open UI, of course).

The fourth pillar of a potential Siebel renaissance (as our friend Bruce Daley has referred to at the beginning of this year -http://www.brucedaley.com/siebelobserver/2014/01/2014-the-year-of-a-siebel-renaissance.html) - and from my point of view the real indication that the Siebel team in Oracle is taking this seriously - is the introduction of a complete SRF and web templates free deployment (also called Run-time configuration) and a web version of the Siebel Tools that should allow you to do some basic customization of Siebel directly on the web browser, something similar to what you can do nowadays with Cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com. This is not something that will be available in the coming IP-2014 anyway, but should come from 2015 on. Of course this is a big change and will be released step by step, also because I am not totally convinced that you can successfully deploy all the current powerful Siebel configuration possibilities into a web browser: one of the limits of customization possibilities for cloud packaged applications (if we can define them so) relies exactly on this, in fact.

Oracle future strategy aims at a so called Single Unified Tools on the web (weirdly very similar to our Unified Perspective approach) so that changes can be applied on an environment that is very similar to the end-user one.

This unification should also bring new Optimized Testing capabilities for Siebel applications (Packaged Siebel Test Automation Interfaces and Objects).

As you can see, lots of new developments should arrive to completely refresh the Siebel technology and this reinforces my point of view that on-prem or on the cloud, it is just a question of the technical evolution that an application is going through. Once your user interface is HTML5 compatible, your tools are web compatible, and you can rely on standard integration interfaces, the real difference between Cloud or On-Prem relies on the fact that data is on your own servers or on third-parties’. That’s really it!

As for the timing for the commitment to do such changes, well... That’s a completely different story, and we could write an entire new article and discuss for days... My personal opinion is that these changes are at least 6 years late and that I am quite sure that around half of the lost Siebel customers in these years would still be on Siebel, if such changes would have been applied in a coherent time frame.

I just want to finish this long post reinforcing the fact that this just represents my point of view on the current scenario and it is particularly referred to the long list of Siebel customers I talked with that are worried about the future of their CRM platform. As I mentioned, going to the Cloud could be the right decision for some, but for others I would say that right now they can look at their years of investment as an asset and not any longer as a liability. Above all, I always invite everyone to critically analyse what "cloud" really means, because at the end of the day the real important thing is that your piece of software is up to date with the recent technologies and the possibilities they offer, not where you store your data.

Personally, I can say that we at e-Up will still commit with strategic and technical consultancy and innovative new software for Siebel, together with other technologies... but that’s another story...

So, as usual, stay tuned...

Manuel

e-Up new website is live

Dear,

I have abandoned this blog long time ago and for good.. I am sorry for the amount of readers that regularly checked this blog for some news.
The recent 5 years long financial crisis has impacted everyone and everything and so the publishers I was collaborating for to write my articles. Additionally, the attitude of corporations towards consultancy has changed, also due to the lack of quality of many providers, guilty of overpricing very bad quality services.
But they say during crisis the most innovative ideas take place. I hope this is the same in our case, as we dedicated time to hard work and research and started a company based in Dublin in 2012: e-Up Unified Perspective.
We just launched our new website and the new software at the same time.
e-Tools is the result of advanced research and consultancy, and its aim is supporting the implementation and above all the analysis of all existing Siebel applications that are still out there, despite the slow reduction of implementations due to the competition, above all versus Salesforce.com, as prefered CRM platform.
To be honest the first competitor of Siebel has been been its new owner: Oracle. It's their policy towards the one time first CRM platform in the world, that has actually killed it.
As I will attend next Oracle Open World and the Siebel 2014 IP will be presented, I am really curious about the way Oracle will promote its strategy.
Despite some employees still insist on the fact that Siebel is not dead and that new functionalities will be presented towards next years, the market seems to have less and less interest on this technology, even after the advent of Open UI.
Siebel implementations failed and continue to fail because the lack of best practices and tools that support this. Business analysis, for example, has never been supported or "educated" by Oracle, leaving it to the disorganization of Organizations. or to the trends of too heavy and too generic methodologies.
e-Tools will allow the modelling of visual artefacts for all the phases of a typical Siebel implementation, easing the adoption of best practices.
I refer to Siebel Tools as an old punch cards machine, with its old-fashioned parametrization approach, without mentioning the lack of support for anything else (requirements gathering, modelling, application design, etc.). Have a look at the first video about e-Tools and let me know if you realize the difference with the standard Siebel Tools:

Having worked with Cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com, I cannot be good with new available tools as well. On the contrary, while Siebel was a greatly engineered piece of software, recent trends tend to bring us back, rather than forward. I cannot think any longer about any valid packaged application in the market, simply because the tendency is that of returning to custom development, despite the fact you use an old programming language or a "cool" new one. Some technical solutions for corporations are simply embarrassing; customers have to be lighten from the burden of over-engineered and not useful technologies, but this does not mean solutions have to be technically crap.
If cloud is now so trendy, be sure you will soon find silos also in the sky, not only on your premises...

But I have probably taken too much time and too much space for the initial intention of this post, therefore I end simply simply inviting you to visit our new website www.e-up.pro.
We shall probably introduce a blog section on the website, therefore I might continue posting some articles there... stay tuned!

Asset-based ordering

As part of the Order Management module, Asset-based ordering needs to be activated separately, allowing customization of workflows and business services.
Asset-based ordering bases on a prior order by the customer, thus on the fact that the customer already owns (or uses) a product (service) provided by the company or a partner. A customer that has acquired telecommunications services, providing the organization with a phone line and a phone number, owns, from the provider’s perspective, a valuable Asset on which building on future activities (a key strategy CRM point is in fact maintaining existing customers, before acquiring new ones). The client could, for example, decide to request other phone numbers on the same line, or to split existing numbers on different lines.
Asset-based ordering leverages the order management process as it supports the creation and management of complex orders (containing complex pricing, combined billing types, combinations of services, multiple suppliers, etc.). In the example given above, the phone line could be the property of a partner (as the distributor in an Energy business scenario), while even the service could be provided by another one; nevertheless, the client receives one bill containing the information for the various services, as well as segmented prices based on consumption.
After the first negotiation and order with the client, the sales worker can generate an Asset directly from the order. Starting from this Asset, new quotes and orders can be generated, or changes can be done to existing quotes orders. If the client changes the initial order, changes can be accepted (based on company’s policies) and implemented. It is easier as well managing subscriptions as the Asset management allows suspending, discontinuing or resuming the service provided. If the client does not pay the bill, the provider can decide to act by suspending the service until the payment is realized, so resuming the existing service. A household might request the provider to interrupt the service over a period of time (when they go on vacation for 3 months they do not need the home phone). In this case the provider stops the service and resumes it again at the client’s request. Figure 1 shows a Crm-UP, UML compliant, description of the functional cases managed by Siebel Asset-based ordering module (the module is depicted as the blue cube, reconnecting the business scenario to technical aspects of the Siebel architecture – as a specific case study).

Figure 1. Asset-based ordering – overview use-cases model describing the main actions supported for a sales worker, interacting with the system.

The Assets owned by the customer are registered in a service profile, indicating the installed assets. It is easily accessed from the Account Screen, Installed Assets view, and allows the customization of specific automated workflows to reduce the amount of time to create quotes, orders and assets.
There are three scenarios for initiating Asset ordering. The client can ask for a revision of an existing order (not yet passed over the point of no return). In this case, after negotiating the quote and starting the order process, the client decides to change something (a product/service, or conditions of the order, etc.). Depending on the organizational policies, the order might still be changed, unless is has reached a point when the changing costs are too high (the point of no return for order execution).
A second scenario envisions the client as owner of an Asset, but wishing to modify it. It is the case, for example, of a telco company’s client that wants to change from one type of contract to another, because her/his needs have changed, so that less free minutes are required (a down-grade of contract).
The last scenario envisions the modification of the prior order by adding a new item. The client might want a new phone line and number to be added to the prior subscription. The basic conditions are not modified in this case, just new items are added and might have an impact on the general order (on the sum, etc.).

Figure 2. General flow of Asset-based ordering following three initialization scenarios.

The three scenarios have different evolutions, depicted in figure 2. When modifying an existing Asset, the Sales Worker has to start from the Assets screen and fill in the details as required. Afterwards it is possible to generate a new quote and transform it in an order (following internal processes) with the help of automated workflows (like automatic generation of Quote from Asset, and of Order from Quote). When adding a new item, the Sales Worker starts from the Quotes screen, creating the Quote and filing in its details. If the change regards an existing Order, following organizational policies, the Sales Worker accesses directly the Order and performs the modifications. The execution of the order and its monitoring is facilitated by the integration with back-office systems.
Businesses that combine products and services, such as Telecommunication and Energy industry, can take advantage of the facilities offered by Asset-based ordering, reducing client-service time and improving overall monitoring of customer and service.

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.

CRM 360° chooses Microsoft Dynamics CRM

There is one big contradiction in the consultancy area related to the CRM scenario. When a company, acting in whatever industry field, requests some kind of support to a consultancy company for the implementation of their own CRM strategy and the related Packaged Application, it expects something that goes beyond the possibilities it has internally.
Apart from the mere expertise on the customization of the platform (being Oracle Siebel, SAP CRM, Microsoft Dynamics or others), the consultancy should postulate a professional expertise in the business context that the application supports, that is the Customer Relationship Management as a general integrated approach to identify, acquire and retain customers.
Have you ever asked your provider which platform do they use internally to support the services they are offering to you, as a client?

Our point of view is that last five years and hundreds of unsatisfactory implementations around the globe should have taught that CRM is not just deploying a more or less customized Packaged Application in a company. We know, there's never time to do a complete analysis of the business and an optimization/adaptation of the processes, once we decide we have to implement something that helps us in the daily interaction with our customers. But this, moreover, underlines the importance of a qualified and business aware consultancy. Once delimeted the business sector, and (why not) the immediate low level requirements for a CRM implementation (salesmen need a concrete support? Contact Center operators should have access to the history of a client to provide better quality services?) a good consultancy should indicate the best solution for you and, above all, how to implement it not to throw your money in something you will never use or, on the contrary, bribing you with easy, light and simple solutions that will cost you in time, facing integration problems and an unrealistic view of your customers.

The real question we asked ourselves is: "how can I really sell myself as a CRM implementation expert and seriously offer my services to my clients, if I don't apply CRM both strategically and technically in my own organization?". Well, it's not so obvious, and daily experiences in many international projects show how poor the strategy in the relationship among the different stakeholders is. No, look, think about it: in consultancy often we are still just on the ERP processes matter, above all on the billing side...

We are aware that, if we don't live the same approach, no real professional support on the delivery of a complete and coeherent CRM infrastructure can be offered.
Let's face the truth: a company that wants to be customer oriented and consequently puts care in the relationship with its customers, doesn't receive the same kind of quality level from the consultancy it receives. This does matter!

Following this concept, based on an analysis of our current business, we have done a coeherent analysis and a consequent software selection, finally deiciding to implement Microsoft CRM (for the moment).

The reasons of this coiche rely on a clear knowledge and awareness of our business and our action scope, together with the functional and technical experience in different platforms.
Microsoft Dynamics is undoubtedly one of the lighter and general purpose CRM solutions. In comparison with other PAs it currently lacks of specific ad-hoc verticalizations, and we cannot exactly talk of functional flows that reproduce business processes in the navigation of the application. Even technologically, above all on the Contact Center side, there are limitations.
Microsoft CRM has the advantage of a full integration with the spreaded Office Automation tools (shall we discuss about the main analysis tool of many sales people, even if the organization has a main BI Tool?).
In any case, the main CRM Domains are there, and a good Model of the main CRM components can be available directly on your Outlook client and that of your colleagues and employees.
After some days of installation I would personally have something to say regarding the platform and component requirements, as well as of the lack of some notes that should be included in the official documentation, but let's keep this for another post...
In the meantime, think about this, and feel free to share with us your opinion. Your impression does matter!