CRM

CRM also known as Customer Relationship Management is a strategy which involves all aspects of interaction that an organization has with its current and future customers. CRM uses technology to organize, automate, integrate from marketing, sales, and customer service component of the organization.

The rewards or advantages of CRM includes:
 * enables the organization to understand its customers better.
 * attract new customers
 * improve customer satisfaction level
 * increase profit

The risks or disadvantages of CRM includes:
 * time-consuming (when recording & retrieving customers' information)
 * expensive to implement
 * dehumanization of sales process

An analysis of the similarities and differences of the four initiatives
The four initiatives share the same purpose in aiding the enterprise to manage their customers and information.


 * Each of them serves different specific purposes


 * As such CRM deals directly with the customers and managing the relationship between the enterprise and customers.
 * SCM deals with the input, process and output say for example a product. It focuses on the PROCESS.
 * BI owns a pool of data and sits between the DW and decision maker.
 * ERP basically integrates all the three initiatives. An example of ERP vendor is SAGE.