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A high-tech company worldwide leader
in its market segment*
Requirements Document
for a Customer Relationship Management System
This Belgian company has
developed a technology which is the worldwide leader in its market
segment (electronics). The company has offices in many countries
(Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia) in
which salesmen canvass their area, negotiate sales and track
customers. Objectiver
has been used to document the current CRM system, analyze the
situation and produce a requirements document for the next CRM system.
*: To be compliant with a non-disclosure agreement signed with our customer, the name of our customer shall remain hidden in this description.
*: To be compliant with a non-disclosure agreement signed with our customer, the name of our customer shall remain hidden in this description.
Context
- A CRM application has already been deployed some years ago but is not used by a lot of salesmen who consider the application sometimes cumbersome to use and not well integrated
- Products sold by the company are highly customizable which makes each order specific.
- Offer templates exist in Excel ; those templates are selected and customized by salesmen to produce offers. The complexity of the domain shows that the Excel-based technology has come to its limit.
- Orders are managed in a ERP back-office systems which drives the billing and the production planning process. Customer orders need to be reconciliated with the offers and encoded manually into the ERP back-office system
- Discontinuities in the presales-sales-billing-production processes are error-prone and make business and financial forecasts not so reliable as they should be.
Service provided
- Coaching of one IT analyst from the company to use Objectiver.
- All involved stakeholders (salesmen, salesmen assistants, CFO, administration, production managers, IT/IS staff) have been interviewed according to a prepared template; interview minutes have been realized by completing the templatre on the fly
- Requirements elicitation from interview minutes (with traceability), requirements modelling
- Retro-engineering of the exisiting data and processes
- Requirements document writing
- Preparation of the technical evaluation spreadsheet that each tender is required to fulfill to position his solution according to the set of published requirements
Added Value
- Involvement of all stakeholders
- Coaching avoiding that the analysts spend too much time to become acquainetd with the method and the tool
- Production of a model that makes each stakeholder more aware of what is at stake (complexity of the integration behind the scene and the needed compromise to find between ease of use and the level of information needed to be provided to trigger and automate downstream processes besides the purely sales-related processes)
- High-level documentation in UML to specify the information
to be exchanged for a seamless integration with the ERP
- Evaluation spreadsheet summing up all the requirements and listing the evaluation criteria wrt which tenders are required to position their solutions.