HP BOOSTS CRM WITH ORACLE

For businesses these days, managing customer relationships is about putting the strength and skills of an entire organization behind every customer interaction from the time a company first begins to market its products and services to flexibly tailoring a service contract, to having a complete customer history at the click of a button.

The word for this new customer-centric business focus is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). When Hewlett-Packard Company determined that its global sales force needed to collaborate and share real-time information over the Internet, HP partnered with Oracle Corporation for the sales force automation portion of HP's complete CRM solution.

A Solution with a View

It would be an understatement to say that the Internet has created a whole new set of rules regarding managing and interacting with customers. To remain competitive, businesses are quickly making the transition to e-businesses, a change that requires a strong information management foundation to fully understand customer requirements.

"HP's systems and processes used to be masked by people working between the systems and the customer," explained Mike Overly, Project Manager, Sales Force Automation. "But that's not the way business is conducted on the Internet. The problem we faced was that HP has many separate parts of the company that interact with our customers. In most cases, they collect data about that interaction, but there is no common thread that allows the different HP groups to know what's going on with the same customer."

He continued, explaining, "There has been no way anyone in HP can accurately get a 360-degree view of a customer. We have to be able to understand, anticipate and respond to our customers' needs, all in a cost-effective manner. HP's CRM solution will allow us to see the full customer picture."

Oracle CRM: A Clear Choice

In selecting a solutions provider for sales force automation, HP had a wide range of choices. Solutions offerings generally fall into two different categories: vendors with a robust functionality in an aging client/server architecture; and Internet start-up vendors offering point products.

"Oracle CRM is a hybrid of both," said Overly. "The heart of any CRM is the database. Oracle is an established world leader, and its application suite is a true Internet-based architecture offering a broad portfolio, with more than 35 application modules. Oracle was selected for a variety of reasons including our jointly shared vision of the future of the solution suite. The HP Performance Tuning Center has been jointly established and funded by HP and Oracle. Within it, application modules such as CRM, are tested and optimized for the HP-UX environment leading to superior benchmarking performance."

Focusing on Sales Force Automation

HP is implementing Sales Force Automation, Marketing, Telesales, Customer Care and Sales Compensation. "Each one of these will provide different views based on the needs of the user, but they're all coming back to the same core: a large, virtual database that contains all the customer interaction information," said Overly. "In the future, we'll want to integrate the marketing activities and our customers' Internet activities, because as our customers start doing configurations online and they pull product information and make product selections, we'll want to capture that information. Additionally, we need to have linkage to the transaction systems like SAP order management, manufacturing and logistics, distribution activities. This is not something we can do overnight, but certainly what we plan to do in the upcoming months and years."

On the hardware side, HP selected HP 9000 V- N- and L- Class Enterprise Servers together with HP SureStore E Disk Array XP256 for the pilot. "Because the Oracle CRM offering is a Web application, you have to have a reasonable user response time. If someone is using their browser in Singapore and finds that the performance is not good because the server and storage of data is in Atlanta, then this project has failed. The idea is to have a global instance of the database, and that calls for a robust hardware configuration."

Today there are 3 hardware configurations in operation: A "sandbox" development environment, a test environment and the pilot. The "sandbox" is made up of an HP 9000 N4000 for the database server, two HP 9000 L2000 application servers and one HP SureStore E Disk Array FC60. The test environment and the pilot are identical, both using Oracle CRM on two HP 9000 N4000 servers and one L2000 Server connecting to an HP SureStore E Disk Array XP256. "We selected the XP256 disk array for our pilot's storage environment because we wanted to be able to easily scale it up once we get into our full global production. Plus we expect to upgrade the N4000 database server once we switch from pilot to production and ramp up the number of accounts on the system," explained Overly.

In July the pilot will upgrade to the current release of the Oracle Sales Force Automation allowing the sales representatives to be able to use their laptop PCs to connect to the database. The global rollout will start with Customer Care, Marketing, Telesales and Sales Force Automation - completely integrated with one another.

"The full extent of the Oracle modules that we will implement is still undecided," noted Overly. "However, Oracle also is an HP e-Services partner and we have a long history of working together, plus a common vision of the future of the Internet. The relationship we have with Oracle goes beyond their sales force automation software running on our hardware. Oracle is working closely with HP to integrate and optimize their application solutions with products such as our Web quality of service offering (HP WebQoS), management solution (HP OpenView), and high availability products (HP MC/ServiceGuard)."

Compiling an Expert Team

The sales force automation pilot solution rollout occurred in February 2000, to ensure its success HP compiled a team of internal HP personnel, HP Consulting, Oracle Consulting and Ernst & Young specialists in September 1999.

"Because this is a large, complex project, there is a tremendous amount of work involved," noted Overly. "The pilot is centering on several large global accounts with sales teams distributed around the world (Ford, Motorola, State Farm, General Motors, Carrefour and Roche.) We think this should give us a good test of global implementation. To do this, we developed a project structure that allows us to focus on the implementation as a whole, as well as specifically on six main areas that we believe are fundamental to our success."

The six key areas for HP's implementation of Oracle's applications are IT infrastructure, application development, information integration, process engineering and quality, change management and global deployment.

"The IT infrastructure section was lead by HP Consulting. With their level of expertise, it was pretty straightforward," said Overly. "They have determined how many servers will be needed, high availability and back-up strategies, network requirements and all of the scalability issues. Oracle Consulting is heading up the application development area since they have very tight links to their development organization. As Oracle's largest CRM sales force automation customer to date, HP will be a beta site for future releases and therefore able to influence future functionality to meet our needs."

Unifying Channels Across the Board

A critical factor in this project is information integration. "It's important to understand where that information comes into HP, how you get it and then make sure that it's accurate," said Overly. "We also need to find out what processes are involved, and what other applications within HP will use the data. Then, we need to develop a strategy for how that information will flow in and out of the database."

Specialists from HP, Oracle and Ernst & Young are working together to lead the process engineering and quality section of the project. The team will work with HP sales personnel to develop and document the company's processes to ensure a complete global standardization.

Another large effort in HP's CRM project is change management. "This is where the project leaders will have to get into the minds of the sales reps and sales support team members," explained Overly. "The HP change management leaders are receiving help from Ernst & Young, leveraging some of the work that was completed on the HP/Agilent Company split."

The final focus of HP's CRM implementation will be on global deployment. With input from the change management and process engineering teams, this group will control the flow of communication, as well as perform the training and implementation of the solution.

Measuring HP's Success

As with any large-scale project, measurements for success must be built into the process. To gauge the success of its Oracle CRM sales force automation implementation, HP will review both the productivity gains within the organization and the effect upon customer loyalty. "We're working on ways to measure productivity increases right now," said Overly. "From a sales perspective, we understand how much it costs us today to manage our customer interaction data. We expect that our new CRM sales force automation solution will give us a better ability to cost-effectively manage our business. We'll be able to improve our understanding of our interaction with our customers across HP globally, as well as perform real-time forecasting. Additionally, we'll be able to prioritize opportunities and apply the required resources. We believe that by driving the automation of the sales force from the business, and working hand-in-hand with Oracle, we will end up with the most effective solution possible."

Overly concluded, "Quite simply, customer satisfaction and loyalty will be used to manage our objective of providing an industry-leading customer experience.

Challenges

• Cost-effectively collect and analyze customer information across all areas of HP
• Improve market reach and customer loyalty by implementing the most appropriate customer interaction strategy
• Provide accurate, real-time information about global sales forecasts, the availability of products and other critical customer information

Solutions

• Implement Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - Sales Force Automation, Marketing, Telesales, Customer Care and Sales Compensation
• Pilot on HP 9000 N4000, L2000 Enterprise Servers and HP SureStore E Disk Array XP256

Expected Results

• Increased ability to effectively manage the business
• Improved understanding of interaction with customers across HP globally
• Provide an industry-leading customer experience

Technology Highlights

• HP Consulting for IT infrastructure design
• Oracle CRM Sales Force Automation Modules (version 3i for the pilot and 11i for production)
• Oracle 8i database
• Oracle Consulting for application development
• Ernst and Young consulting for process engineering

Pilot Configuration:

• 2 HP 9000 N4000 Enterprise Servers - one for database, the other for application modules
• 1 HP 9000 L2000 Enterprise Server for application modules
• 1 HP SureStore E Disk Array XP256
• MC/ServiceGuard

"We expect that our new Oracle CRM solution for sales force automation will give us a better ability to cost-effectively manage our business. This CRM solution will provide a platform that enables worldwide collaboration and more efficient business and sales processes. We'll be able to improve our understanding of our interaction with our customers across HP globally, thereby dramatically improving our customers' experience. Additionally, we'll be able to prioritize opportunities and apply the required resources. We believe that by driving the automation of the sales force from the business, and working hand-in-hand with Oracle, we will end up with the most effective solution possible," concluded Mike Overly Project Manager, Sales Force Automation Hewlett-Packard Company.