CRM System

Executive Summary

A $50B global healthcare company replaced aging systems to gain a unified, customer-centric view of all sales and service activity.

Case Background

Industry: Healthcare; manufacturing
Company: A 100-year-old global organization with more than 100,000 employees

Key Challenges and Goals

The company's global sales and service groups – more than 10,000 employees – call on a broad variety of clients, including large, complex healthcare institutions. The company needed an integrated and consolidated view of the activity with each client. Its existing systems no longer met business or technical requirements, and could not adapt to the rapidly changing market environment. The organization engaged Affinity to identify and help implement a scalable and cost-effective platform with necessary support for multiple languages, currencies and business processes.

Affinity's Approach and Solutions

Affinity worked closely with the client to develop specifications for a base platform to support global sales and service. This platform identified business functionality that was common to all of the organization's operating units, and was built to allow different units to make modifications or additions necessary to support their local processes. Key to the effort was the coordination of more than 200 personnel in a dozen teams around the world to help create accurate specifications. Also, due to varying compliance requirements in different countries, Affinity designed executed a quality testing program with more than 20,000 test steps to ensure consistent quality and results.

Results

The new system provides the company with richer, more timely information about all client activity, which has yielded more efficient sales and service work and more accurate forecasting. Productivity and top-line revenue are expected to increase by more than $2M total, and ongoing costs and compliance-related expense reductions are expected to match that amount.

Project Snapshot

Technology: Siebel 8.0 software; OracleFusion middleware; Application Integration Architecture; service-oriented architecture; Oracle 10g and 11i databases; Sun Solaris

Affinity expertise applied:
- Business and technology planning and alignment
- Application development and innovation
- Change management
- Project management

Project Duration: Five to six quarters

Cost Range: $5M