SAP CRM or SAS for a manufacturing company?

SAP CRM or SAS for a manufacturing company?

We are a manufacturing company seeking a suitable CRM program for our consumer care department. The system is used to capture complaints, sample requests, donations and survey data from consumers.

This information will be used by the marketing department to analyze consumer purchase patterns and other data analysis as well as for planning promotions. We find that most of the CRM software in the market is for sales force tracking, which is not so useful to us. Can you recommend CRM software that meets our requirements?

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As much as I'd like to recommend a particular software, there is no way to recommend something like that without a lot more information and several caveats. There are several vendors that might be have what you are looking for. The most qualified from that standpoint -- depending on your size and the level of complexity you're looking for and the delivery and reporting that you require --would be either SAS or SAP's industry-specific analytics. Each company has a different strength -- SAS for the quality of the analytics themselves, SAP for the vertical specialization.

I'm not clear on how big you are or the scope of your need so I can't really comment more particularly, though these two vendors are for midsized and larger companies generally, and while they can service smaller institutions, they aren't what I'd recommend for smaller institutions. Additionally, if you are willing to step up a little to what is called enterprise marketing management (EMM), which is a bit more customized and extended, I would look into Quaero. They do exceptionally high-caliber work that goes well beyond analytics but is still organized around high-performance marketing. I hope this helps.

This was first published in July 2006