It said it aims to tackle the issues of optimizing the value and cost-of-ownership and improving operational efficiency by enabling customers to streamline business processes, increase user adoption, and provide more insight into customer trends.
It said user adoption is addressed through a new and simplified user interface, which is an answer to the longstanding criticism that CRM interfaces are overly complex. User adoption plus the desire to extract more value from the installed software is the driver behind new reports and productivity enhancements such as an XML publisher that provides standards-based flexible reporting and document output capabilities.
Oracle has also taken steps to redesign and streamlineCRM task flows and cross-industry business processes to enable users to complete critical business processes such as order-creation or tracking within the CRM application. This answers the call for a unified customer view and the ability to carry out operations from a single environment. The Oracle advances cannot match what Microsoft can offer with its CRM application which uses Office as the interface, but go some way toward reducing the need to access different applications and user interfaces.
The final improvement of note is better cross-suite application integration with out-of-the box integration between Oracle E-Business Suite 12 and Oracle Contact on Demand. Oracle said it provides organizations with a low-cost, flexible, and secure entry point into integrated CTI multi-organizational access control, which should increase the efficiency of shared services across multiple operating units.
Our View
The release is not a major one but keeps the CRM components within E-Business Suite ticking along nicely, providing sufficient forward momentum, Oracle hopes, to keep users’ attention on their installed implementations and the task of extracting more value from them, rather than casting around for alternatives prior to the rollout of Fusion applications.
