Siebel Upgrade Packed with Business Processes

Siebel Systems today started shipping a new version of its CRM application that offers hundreds of embedded business practices and new functionality for multichannel management of sales, marketing, service, partners, and employees. The key addition to the update, Siebel 7.5, is the inclusion of hundreds of business practices. The San Mateo, Calif.-based software developer has leveraged its experience with more than 3,500 customers and 10 years in business to document hundreds of industry-specific best practices for every aspect of CRM. Embedded directly in the application, the business processes are a structured series of documented activities that accomplish a specific business objective. In addition, Siebel 7.5 supports business processes across multiple applications, such as service provisioning in communications, formulary management in pharmaceuticals, and trade promotions and funds management in consumer goods, according to company officials. "The best practice business processes embedded in Siebel 7.5 will help us reach our business objectives and improve our ability to meet our customers' needs across all business and geographical lines," said David Beck, Director, Strategic Operations, Quest Software, in a statement. The best practices encapsulated in Siebel 7.5 as business processes are extended across the enterprise through Web Services and Universal Application Network. Support for Web services. And Universal Application Network allows Siebel 7.5 to work with emerging application frameworks including Microsoft's .NET and Sun Microsystems' Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This allows customers to integrate data and cross-application business processes from different software. Siebel has also enhanced the functionality within its sales, marketing, and service applications by adding many new features. Siebel Sales adds global account visibility and robust incentive compensation; Siebel Interactive Selling sports enhanced customer order management, product catalog and pricing management; Siebel Marketing now adds Decision broker, budgeting and objectives management, enhanced customer and promotion analytics, enhanced collaborative marketing; and Siebel Field Service offers logistics management, contract performance analytics, complex hierarchical assets, and quality/defect management. Release 7.5 also beefs up functionality within the Siebel Analytics and Siebel Employee Relationship Management (ERM) product lines to deliver relevant, actionable, just-in-time intelligence to employees, partners, and customers. New to the Siebel suite of applications is the Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM), which unifies customer information across business units and systems into a single customer profile repository. Siebel UCM enables enterprises to maximize cross-selling opportunities and improve the customer experience, company officials say. Steve Bonadio, Senior Program Director, META Group, says, "the UCM eliminates the need for each country or geographic area to have its own CRM system because application vendor support for double-byte character sets and Unicode will enable multinational companies to reduce application management complexity through consolidation of multiple application and database instances, while facilitating their efforts to enable a truly global panoramic view of the customer." Siebel says the upgrade will ship simultaneously in 17 languages.