DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for the ‘CRM’ Category

Just a quick post for now. This is the sizzle video created by MS for the 4.0 launch. Short, sharp and to the point.

What is a BRE?

The Business Rules Engine (BRE) is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. A BRE can be used in Business Process Automation to significantly streamline the operational efficiency in a business.

A modern BRE is best thought of a rule management system. The rules of a business can change as the business grows or evolves. Certain rules may be applicable within a certain timeframe for example and therefore Business rules need to be updated and managed with the changing needs of the business.

The BRE can be used as a vehicle to translate ‘business logic’ into information workflows.

What are Business Rules?

Rules are everywhere. In fact a good business is valued or assessed on its systems, policies and procedures. These can also be known as business rules.

Business rules are visible in all businesses from SMB to Corporate. If you are able to document and map your business rules, you stand a good chance of significantly increasing the efficiency of your business through software and automation of some of your business processes.

The following table provides examples of some of the rules that might effect decisions in various industries.

You will notice that all business rules can be summarised into two categories

Either IF – THEN statements or IF – THEN – ELSE statements

The IF – THEN statement is also known as an inference rule and can be used to look up make decisions such as ‘Should this customer be approved for a mortgage?’ by executing rules of the form “IF some-condition THEN allow-customer-a-mortgage”. They can also be used to create fact tables which may allow the system to statements such as. If the conditions are ‘wet’ and the vehicle is over 1.5 tonnes, then the maximum permitted speed is 40 kph in populated areas.

The other condition, the IF – THEN- ELSE statement is also referred to as an ‘Event Condition Action’ rule.

Modern Rules Engines can really be considered rule management systems. For instance our rules engine provides a rule authoring environment, as well as a server, testing environment and library. Effectively a library of rules can be written, reused, activated and deactivated over time.

The rules are no longer in the control of a programmer but a business analyst who can write or modify the rules in Domain Specific Language (DSL). This means that the rules are written in a language that is industry specific rather than code.

How can is it used?

Our BRE can be used as part of a customworkflow solution or a part of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in unison with Biztalk.

A interesting application for a BRE could in the automation of a help desk functionality. Where a large knowledge base exists, the BRE can be used to understand where the knowledge base is applicable through rules.

More reasons to use a BRE…

Every business is different Our rules engine is may deliver some or all of the following benefits.

·
Drastically
reduce development time and costs

o
From
5000 lines of code in C# to 150 lines of code in the BRE.

·
Significantly
reduce maintenance cost.

·
Change
business rules on the fly – less change requests and less programming!

·
Build
a faster more reactive business systems.

·
Protect
data consistency by using a BRE to handle complex calculations.

·
Remove
manual Processes where possible

·
Allocate
human resources to more humanistic tasks.

·
Free
up your overstretched IT department.

Need to know more?

If you need to know more or have any questions about how BRE can help your business, feel free to contact us.

Another successful implementation for us and this time the customer is…. US! You know the old adage about plumbers with leaky taps, well our own CRM was a long time coming but well and truely worth the wait. I have used a number of CRM’s in my Sales career including the usual suspects such as ACT!, Filemaker and Salesforce and SugarCRM. This is by far the most exciting CRM I have used to date. Thats right – I said exciting!

So what’s all the fuss about? Well for me good technology is technology that makes my life easier. If you know me, you may know that I am the first person to feel the urge to shout expletives or feel the urge to throw things at your monitor when things don’t go my way. It’s therefore refreshing when something comes along that works right away.

Now before I give a 100% thumbs up rating, I should add here that the engineer that installed the system had a few ‘challenging moments.’ The installation is for an experienced software engineer and Microsoft prefer that they are CRM certified.

But lets down to the business end of the application… Firstly, as a user you have some choices to make. Do you want to view the CRM in a seperate environment such as a web browser or would you prefer to view all of your information in Outlook? This comes by way of an Outlook tool bar which not only tracks important email in CRM but also gives you access to everything that I can think of a singular, familiar interface. I haven’t tried it, but I expect I could spend my entire day within outlook without ever having to leave.

I expect there are few people out there that don’t have some experience in outlook and familiarising yourself with Dynamics CRM is no more difficukt than reading your email. A full history of clients is easily accessible and the ’story’ of our client contact can be accessed within a few clicks.

One of the real beauties however is the ease with which data was imported and campaigns could be put together. CRM easily merges with word and outlook which makes a direct mail, or personalised email news letter with a follow up call acheiveable within a few screens in the quick campaigns wizard.

Workflows can be automated and configured from within the application and custom fields can be added by your average line manager rather than the ‘IT guy.’ All of the usual reports can be accessed as standard and addition reports can be authored easily.

We have only had dynamics CRM live in our office for a few weeks but already we are starting understand mor about our customers that we imagined possible in such a short space of time.

Beyond all this, there’s an enormous amount of functionality that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play with so expect to hear more in the coming weeks. I may even do a quick video on this in the next few weeks. If you want to know more about how CRM can fit your team, feel free to get in contact.

Apologies for using the dreaded ‘R’ word but since the mainstream media seems hell bent on using it, I figure a niche blog isn’t going to make that much difference.

So, I attended a seminar during the week on recession proof marketing. The key lessons from this event was that that regardless of whether you thing the “R” is coming, the fundamental principles of marketing remain more important now than ever.

1) First of all the Unique Selling Proposition is key. Personally I have always like the idea of  an unfair advantage over a USP but thats splitting hairs.

2) Most importantly, it’s important to focus on the acquisition and retention of customers. I know this sounds obvious but when we really stop and think about this in more detail, we can all do this a hell of alot better

Firstly, When is the last time you spoke to your entire past customer database with a  new proposition? How often do you talk to them? How much did it cost the business to bring them on board … and how often do they hear from you.

At my place of work we have taken this idea several steps further again. In unison with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have developed AMS (Automated Marketing System) Not only does this fulfill all of our email marketing needs from a legal and technical persective, but it can also decide what messages to send to the customer depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

The system has built in logic to assess where they are in their relationship with us and will move the ‘lead’ to the appropriate next status ie from a ’suspect’ to a ‘prospect’.

This has been a great way to reach new customers and is much more effective than cold calling for new business.  With our steady trickle of leads, we can turn our sales team into more of a production line. Some or our staff raise contracts and write proposals, some people are customer facing. Some people are more focused on solutions and technical requirements and so on.

Since each task is matched to the right skill set and pay scale, we benefit from cost savings here too.  So why am I telling you this? Well because if we can do this for us, we can do this for you too… that is if you are open to the possibilities.