A friend recently shared a story about a time when he was employed by Yell in their Online Directories business.

Yell found that every time they acquired a new business, it brought with it different business processes. This made it hard to gain efficiencies across the business, and a lot of time, energy and money was wasted on duplicating effort over various business units.

The master-plan: As part of a business process design team, my friend spent a year designing a business process map. Each part of the process was put up on a wall, and eventually it covered a 30-metre stretch of wall.

Two observations:

• Not many businesses can take a year out to fix a problem
• Not many business have the budget to pay a team of business process analysts for 1 year!

For the same reason that you wouldn't tackle a hiking trail without a map or GPS, it would be wise to gain clarity about the scope and costs of your planned CRM implementation. Therefore we recommend an audit, before you start with the implementation.

An audit will cover the following areas:

• IT hardware and infrastructure audit
• Supporting software audit
• High-level data entity audit
• High-level process analysis
• Major workflow processes
• High level employee skills audit / identify in-house "champions"
• Assessment of data quality in existing systems
• Data migration needs audit
• Security model audit
• Training needs audit
• Determine elements of implementation phases

Deliverables:

You will receive a report that indicates your "CRM readiness" in terms of the audit items above. It will give indications of cost-benefit, and suggest a staged implementation plan that delivers maximum ROI in the shortest time possible.

You can use this document in any way you want:

• To influence decision makers / board directors
• To mitigate the risk of the implementation failing
• Should you decide NOT to go ahead, at the very least you will have a blueprint for the implementation that can be used at a future date

How to buy this service

This service costs from £1,500.

Contact us to arrange a suitable date, and also to discuss what you want to get out of the audit.