At Bluefin we went live SAP CRM v5 and NetWeaver 2004s in July 2006, and it is already having a big impact on our business.

How do we use SAP CRM?

Primarily we use CRM Enterprise Contact and Opportunity Management, accessed through Enterprise Portal to capture all of our interactions and opportunities with our customers and prospects. This includes telephone calls, emails, letters, meetings and seminars. We use this to build up a clear picture of our pipeline, to ensure that we have enough work to keep all of our consultants busy. Our business development team have the system set up so that it helps them manage their priorities and stay focused on the key tasks for them. They keep their forecasts up to date (this is using BPS integrated into CRM and forecasts project opportunity by month including value and probability), and we have a monthly review where we aggregate this to feed into our balanced scorecard.

I use BW to review the forecasts and challenge the different account teams to ensure that we have a full and accurate picture of our business. I then look at how our pipeline reflects our strategy and capability, and ensure that we allocate effort in the right area. What a joy to have such a powerful tool at my fingertips! I have already identified two trends that until now I hadn't been able to articulate so clearly:

1. "The Plateau of Trust". Our profile of working with customers is quite interesting. We typically work with a new customer on a small engagement (perhaps a scoping exercise, a proof of concept or a productive pilot), and then we have a period of time where we do very little "invoiced" work with them but we maintain regular contact. Then, we do a more substantial piece of work with them, such as a full scale implementation. With our longer standing customers, we are already seeing a second "plateau of trust" when we again do little chargeable work but remain engaged, after which the cycle starts again. It has proven to me that our strategy of being in business for the very long term is paying dividends.

2. "The Long Tail". Most of our revenue comes from about 30% of our customers. Some consultancies would tell you that this clearly means that we should stop doing business with the other 70%, but that would miss the point. Firstly, much of this 70% will be in the "Plateau of Trust", so we need this 70% as it is part of our future business. And secondly, because we are focused on relationships we will invest in this, even if there isn't an obvious short-term commercial opportunity.

How will Bluefin use this information?

We will ensure that we continue to give our attention to our small customers as well as our large ones. We will continue our strategy of long-term relationship building. And we will try to work out what characteristics our future major customers will have.

How was the actual implementation?

I won't pretend that it was an easy experience. The combination of Ramp Up on several products simultaneously (CRM 5, NW2004s BI, NetWeaver Portal), and external customers taking priority over our in-demand CRM consultants (the cobbler's children syndrome), meant that we had to work hard to get it in. But since the system has been live it has been very stable.

What are the future plans? 

As for the future, there are three clear next steps to take:

• to use CRM for our mail outs (this is marketing functionality)
• to build full business planning into the NetWeaver platform, consolidating on top of the monthly revenue forecasts already in place
• to replace our existing problem management system used by BOSS (our offsite support team) with SAP CRM Service.