Closed Loop Intelligence
December 15th, 2008 | by admin |From a user perspective, this provides closed-loop intelligence in the entire customer interaction and when used appropriately, avoids the kind of situation that Patricia Seybold describes in her book Customers.com. A telephone mail order customer is told a product is out of stock, but is advised by the tele-sales operator the same product is available at K-Mart. The response is: “Why don’t you go get it at K-Mart and mail it to me?” But putting this type of application into the ERP/CRM/SCM mix adds a layer of complexity.
Much of today’s integration work is tied to transaction processing systems but analytic applications draw on subsets of data, usually contained in a staged area or through a data warehouse. If one accepts that the long-term goal for the enterprise is to link its major applications together, to provide a single view of customer interaction and distribute that information across a wide range of potential users, then significant problems lay ahead.
On the one hand, transaction systems have now reached the point where scaling is taken as a given. But data warehouses are typically used by small numbers of users, and extending the information generated in the warehouse back out to applications that sit alongside erp mrp software is not a trivial task.
