Industrial CRM: An Area of Neglect

With up to ten years of continued process improvements on the plant floor, back office, and distribution operations, manufacturers have finally arrived at the front door of customer relationship management (CRM). Still engineering and operations focused, many senior manufacturing executives are strongly resistant and visibly uncomfortable in approaching lean CRM. Applying a kaizen blitz approach to sales and marketing quickly results in the obvious for most manufacturing firms: an area of neglect.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendors are capitalizing their long-established client relationship with manufacturers and distributor by attempting to extend their reach. Some ERP vendors offer industry specific CRM solutions; many do not. Bolt-on generic CRM solutions are frequently sold by ERP vendors assisting only the bottom-line of the software firm.

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