InduPlast

Have you ever paid attention to the hundreds of little plastic containers located in the cosmetics aisle of your grocery store? Or in the pharmaceutical aisle? Or, indeed, in every aisle in most stores? When you consider the plastic containers of all shapes, sizes, and colors that populate our world, it is really amazing! For some reason, every company feels the need to have a custom-designed container for each of its brands and for each product within that brand. Now, have you ever wondered whose job it is to make all of these different containers? In fact, the manufacturer of all of the containers you see likely comes from a very small pool of vendors. One of these vendors is induPlast (www.induplast.it), based in Italy.

With around 70 employees, induPlast manufactures injectionmolded plastic containers, which can be customized for patrons. Unfortunately, induPlast began to experience problems providing adequate support to their customers. Specifically, information for a single customer ended up in different silos of information (i.e., different departments contained customer information, such as marketing, accounting, etc.). This setup made it very difficult for indu Plast to track all of the various business dealings it conducted with a single customer. Not surprisingly, this problem created deficits in customer relationship management (CRM). Compounding this problem was the fact that each customer had multiple customized products. Let's take a hypothetical example. (This situation is entirely fictional-the authors of this text are not familiar with specifi cs regarding induPlast clients.)

Imagine that Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is a customer of induPlast. J&J has multiple divisions including skin and hair care, wound care and topicals, oral healthcare, women's health, and over-the-counter medicines. Indu Plast also has multiple divisions that focus on different product categories such as cosmetics and healthcare. Without a CRM tool, relationships between J&J and induPlast are developed at the division level rather than the corporate level. Therefore, each division of induPlast relates to each division of the customer company as a separate provider or customer, rather than as a department of a company with which induPlast has a unifi ed customer relationship. As you can see, without a CRM system, induPlast collects a great deal of customer data on J&J, but those data are confined to the individual division that gathered them, and they not available to other divisions. So, if induPlast finds it necessary todeal with J&J as a whole (not by division), it would experience major difficulties in assimilating all of the different data points to obtain a unified picture of its customer. To solve problems similar to this fictional (though possible) example, induPlast needed a CRM system that would provide a 360-degree view of each customer.

induPlast chose Sugar CRM, an open-source tool that enables the company to streamline its customer information and communication. The company was able to integrate Sugar with its existing systems to provide management with greater insight into the manufacturing process. Real-time tracking allowed induPlast to make decisions based on complete and current information rather than on stale or incomplete data gathered piecemeal across the company. The result is that induPlast is now able to monitor trends in both the market and customer accounts in real time. As intended, the company now has a 360-degree view of customers across all divisions. CRM tools serve many purposes. In some cases (this case included), they virtually consolidate data. This means that data are still housed in the existing systems where they were gathered, but the CRM connects those systems so that everyone in the company can access the data they need, regardless of which division they work in. In other cases, the CRM completely replaces existing systems and imports the existing data into the new system. Regardless of the method, the goal of CRM is to provide clean, current information on customers to help management make better decisions. Sources: Compiled from www.induplast.it, www.sugarcrm.com, www.jnj.com/ connect/healthcare-products/consumer, accessed March 23, 2012

Questions

1.Why was information stored in "information silos" at induPlast in the first place?

2. Why is a 360-degree view of each customer so important to induPlast?