What's behind that 'single face'?
Hewlett-Packard integrates to balance flexibility and efficiency in customer interaction
By Roberto Michel, senior contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
The vaunted goal of a "single face to the customer" can be overplayed, in the view of Craig Flower, if, in gaining that, you lose the flexibility to deal with customers how they want to be dealt with.
Flower should know. As VP and group information officer of Hewlett-Packard's eBusiness, Customer & Sales Operations (ECO) group, he is deeply involved in its integrated e-Business and back-end systems efforts. He says the formation of ECO back in May 2004, and the launch of revamped Web sites for business customers and consumers in June, were driven by the need to streamline customer interaction while having the flexibility to meet a customer's individual needs.
"ECO reflects the desire to organize internally around the way that customers see the HP experience," says Flower. "Its mission, quite simply, is to make it as easy as possible to interact with HP."
Accommodating multiple channels is crucial to that experience. "We make sure we relate to every part of the market in the way that different types of customers want to interact with HP," he says. "If they want to work through a partner, we support that. If they want to talk with us directly or via the Web, we support that. It's about one face to the customer, but at the same time realizing that customers have many different faces."
HP's experience points to a challenge: how to excel at customer management without dictating to customers. Some answers may lie in the template HP follows: a flexible Web presence built on a common framework, an integrated organization for dealing with customers, and integrated back-end systems to back it all up.
Of course, not every manufacturer has the resources of HP, but other enterprises also leverage enterprise applications and analytical tools to gain insight to customer demand and then they adjust accordingly. It's a challenge that moves beyond rationalization of pricing, product, and customer data to realignment around the customer.
Foundation issues
ECO unites customer-facing processes—such as direct sales, channel management, product support, and pre- and post-sales support—under one organization. ECO includes Internet and marketing services, volume direct operations, sales operations, channel replenishment operations and order management, and customer analysis.
According to Flower, the unit's goals extend the first wave of post-merger integration following HP's acquisition of Compaq. While that effort brought efficiencies, says Flower, "with the creation of ECO, we entered the next phase of an evolution focused on simplifying interaction with the customer and growing revenue."
One HP customer channel is its enhanced Web sites—the public site HP.com and the business customer site HP.com Business to Business (B2B)—unveiled in June 2004. Via these sites, customers purchase products and get support for IT assets purchased from HP. Says Flower, "both sites focus on providing relevant product information and other content to customers in every segment."
While HP's main public site caters to business customers, the B2B site delivers what Flower says are "private sites tuned to individual company accounts." A site links to a customer's procurement system, and functions as a secure informational or purchasing web site managed and hosted by HP.
Capabilities include access to order status and history information, regardless of how orders were placed; purchasing workflow tools; and an information section where HP account teams post roadmaps, proposals, or messages. Sites include alerts tied to order tracking, product support data, white papers, and reports.
The foundation for ECO and for the timeliness and accuracy of site data, says Flower, rests in integrated ERP, customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management systems. Not surprisingly, HP's partner relationship management (PRM) system and CRM system, both from Siebel Systems, are tightly integrated.
HP uses Siebel CRM for sales force, lead management, and contact center tools; marketing resource management; and knowledge management. PRM functions aren't directly tied to HP's private B2B sites, but integration between CRM and PRM ensures consistent pricing and configuration data, and can route leads to channel partners when appropriate. "Job one with PRM is to make us an easy partner to do business with," says Flower. "Job two is to support an integrated customer experience."
Flower says ECO looks to align the business around the customer, rather than be technology-driven. But he admits, "It takes consistent global processes and a technology base to support that."
ERP software from SAP and the CRM system share data, and order history is integrated with the customer-facing Web sites. "A monolithic, non-integrated Web front end doesn't work," says Flower. "When a customer sees order status information on the site, they get that through integration to back-end systems."
Lack of integration can be an obstacle, say experts. "Integration is an over-riding issue in customer management," says Katherine Jones, a research director with Boston-based analyst firm Aberdeen Group. "You can't build a barn out of a bunch of silos."
Without integration between sales force tools, and order and service management, it's difficult to advise customers. Says Jones, "Nothing is more frustrating than trying to sell or up-sell a customer, and not having data that helps you and the customer reach an intelligent business decision."
HP is moving toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in which content on pricing, configurations, and other factors is created once in the appropriate system. "It's so much better to create the data once, and publish it many times, using a SOA," says Flower.
Jones says it's still unclear whether SOA will be the answer for presenting consistent information to customers. Enterprise application integration tools and common user interfaces on Web sites, also are needed, she says.
Flower acknowledges some integration with HP's Web site is "syndication" of content from back-end systems to catalogs rather than direct Web services calls. However, says Flower, some information, such as configurations and pricing, "are callable as Web services" from the B2B site.
Analyzing the point
At HP, CRM is used mainly to automate sales operations processes, but marketing analytics are becoming more important.
Matt Rhoades, manager of business intelligence shared services with Avon, Ohio-based Henkel Consumer Adhesives, the manufacturer of "Duck" tape, says that an integrated business intelligence solution set is, "hands down," a major benefit of Henkel's business intelligence solution from Oracle Corp.
Henkel doesn't use Oracle ERP, but has used its intelligence tools since 1997, says Rhoades, including the Discoverer business intelligence tool, Oracle9iAS portal, and application server products, as well as an Oracle database.
For Henkel, key integration is with the retail point-of-sale data it gets from major customers like Wal-Mart. Rhoades says data is uploaded into Henkel's data warehouse and analyzed to determine sales and profitability trends.
"We're becoming what's known as a 'category captain' for big retailers. We extract point-of-sale data and analyze not only how our products are selling, but also find trends for an entire product category," says Rhoades. "Analysis even goes into where products sit on the shelf. We take the results back to the buyer, and that analysis becomes a value-added service."
The business intelligence solution also factors geography and causal data into the mix, including weather predictions. Henkel uses the analysis to increase tape shipments to distribution centers in the Southeast, if, for example, a hurricane is predicted.
Henkel has more than 300 users of the Oracle-based data warehouse, which holds two terabytes of data. While Rhoades says savings have come from efficient design of Henkel's distribution network, the real point-of-sales analysis is its a boon for customer service. "We've won a vendor of the year award from Wal-Mart three years in a row," says Rhoades. "We're able to give a strong value-add back to the customer in category management. It's like we become a real-estate agent for their shelf space."
