J.D. Edwards Updates CRM, Adds SCM Links

Chief among what the company touts as 175 enhancements is tighter integration with its Demand Consensus module, a supply chain management tool aimed at easing and speeding forecasting, said Joel Reed, director of CRM marketing at the Denver-based company.

"Instead of just takingThe dollar forecast, you can take the product forecast from CRM to this consensus area and compare that with a forecast generated by algorithm, come to consensus and look for outliers," Reed said. "It's valuable that we take our supply chain and CRM capabilities and bring the two pieces together."

Resellers said such integration is important. "J.D. Edwards, Siebel--they're all moving in this direction," said Vukan Ruzic, president and CEO of Profit Concepts International, a Long Beach, Calif.-based solution provider. "[J.D. Edwards CRM 2.0] is a much more stable and robust product [than the current release], and the integration work is on the right track," he said.

The software, available now, also comes with prepackaged mobile sales capabilities that will make it easier for solution providers to set up the system for mobile professionals, Reed said. "Upon implementation, there's a series of check-boxes to help you set up the tables you'll want to see when disconnected," he said. "We made it more automated, took the 37 tables a traveling user might most likely want and let you check them off. In the past, such a setup took a lot more custom work."

Also, a new service management module means contact-center representatives can take a call or chat over the Web, take a service request and have access to all the warranty information based on the structure of the company or the product, Reed said. "They can then create the service order with full visibility into the installed base and track what products are where and what repairs have been done, and assign the service order to a technician," he said.

This "full visibility" thrust is huge for all the ERP, CRM and SCM vendors now, from SAP to Siebel, solution providers said. This so-called 360-degree view of a business's inventory, manufacturing floor and customer order is the holy grail for companies but remains elusive, they said.