 Customer Relationship Management Requirements (Key Business)

Customer Account Management

The CRM module must allow the users to view customers across products, geographies, account, and
status.

Customer Account Dashboard

In a single page, users should be able to see not only account information, but also all associated
sales opportunities, contacts, activities, history, cases, and quotes.

Contact Management
The CRM module must consolidate contacts into a single location and associate accounts with sales
opportunities.

Automated Marketing
An effective CRM module must help the companies to automate marketing and improve their
operational efficiency.

Marketing Resource Management (MRM)

The solution must support marketing operations such as alignment of people, process and
technology management to support marketing activities to enhance marketing effectiveness

Pricing And Tracking

The CRM module must track every item bought, sold, expensed, used or manufactured in order to
account for all business processes in real time.

Cost Summaries
The solution must provide complete cost summaries across any group of items so that users
accurately derive buying and selling prices.

Service Management
The solution must provide effective after-sales Service Management capabilities

Service Monitoring
The solution should enable the organization to effectively monitor and manage service information
such as sales date, service date, and next service due date for their customers.

Sales-Order Management
The solution should enable the organization to effectively manage sales orders throughout all the
major stages, including Sales Order Generation, Work Allocation, Work Completion, and
Billing/Invoicing
Targeted Offers
The solution should enable creation of marketing offers with an objective to boost sales and
profitability of the organization. The offers may be based on customer demographics, time of the
year, festivals, seasons, excessive inventories (for stock-clearance sales) etc.

 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Requirements

(Functional)

Email Tools
The solution's CRM module must allow the user to archive email to CRM, send email directly from
CRM and sync calendars.

Email Integration
The solution must have email integration for major systems such as MS Outlook or IBM Lotus Notes
to streamline common tasks and promote more effective communication with customers.

Case Management
The solution's CRM module must provide customers a focused solution for personalized and high
quality service. It should start from the initial call to resolution and a follow-up. The feature should
enable the service team to manage current case load and respond quickly to customers to achieve
high level of customer satisfaction.

Customer Self-Service
For a CRM module to be competent, it must offer a complete self-service capabilities that enable
users to receive customer orders and help them to reach shoppers anytime, anywhere. The solution
must allow customers to view order history, order status, back orders, open accounts receivable, and
maintain passwords on their schedule.

Opportunity Management
The CRM module should be capable of carrying out presales opportunity management. The solution
must record potential sale or any other type of revenue generating opportunity.

Rental Management
An ERP for Real Estate and Property Management must include rental management functionality. For
property owners and real estate developers, the solution must include financials, billing, lease and
contract management, capital project management, property rentals and real estate sales.

Sales Management: Quoting

The solution with efficient and accurate quoting module must optimizing the organization's profit
margin.

Sales Management: Sales Orders

The solution must automate and optimize all processes in the sales cycle

Sales Management: Electronic Data Interchange

The solution's EDI module must assist and expedite the exchange of critical order data
Sales Management: Shipping And Distribution Management
The solution must ensure that the organization has all the tools and information to manage their
shipments and meet strict shipping requirements on time and under budget.

Sales Literature Creation

The solution should provide the functionality to create sales-related literature. This may be in the
form of brochures, slideshows, flyers, etc. This feature would enable the sales team to present the
product/service to its prospective clients.

Sales-Process Management
The solution must monitor and analyze the entire Sales Process at all the stages during Business
Development, Prospect, Confirmed Sale, Completed Sale or Terminated Sale

Scripts For Sales And Service Personnel

An ERP system should provide the facility to create scripts for Sales Personnel which they can use
during Tele-Sales and Sales Pitches for Face-to-Face and Over-the-Counter Sales

Searchable Knowledge Base

The solution should provide Searchable Knowledge Repositories which should contain Sales/BD
related documents. It should provide the functionality of tagging a particular document to multiple
Companies, Customers/Clients, Subjects, Industries and BD/Client Assignments

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

The CRM module should provide an automatic voice response to customer inquiries or gather
information for intelligent routing of inquiries. The solution should also allow customers to respond
by touch tone, obtain or leave information, and, if needed, connect to the appropriate contact center
agent.

 Supply Chain Management Requirements (Key Business)

Logistics Management
The solution's logistics module should supply fluid processes, storage plans, redistribution of goods
inside a company or delivery of goods to customers.

Logistics Planning
The solution should be involved in the planning of existing infrastructure resources in view of their
optimal use.

Procurement
ERP must allow the users to automate all or part of their procure-to-pay process. The solution should
provide packaged integration to back-office applications, industry specific capabilities, and the
flexibility to meet organization requirements.

Sales-Order Management
The solution must streamline order fulfillment processes and gain effective tracking of sales orders in
the system and provide outstanding customer service.
Automatic Pricing Of Invoices
The solution should enable complex customer pricing structures to be established, automating the
pricing of invoices, as well as being transparent to the operator

Sourcing
The solution must allow the users to automate all or part of their procurement and processes.

Packaged Integration To Back-Office Applications

The solution should provide packaged integration to back-office applications, industry specific
capabilities, and the flexibility to meet organization requirements.

 Supply Chain Management Requirements (Functional)

Advanced Planning System (APS)
A competent APS must track costs based on the activities that are responsible for driving costs in the
production of manufactured goods. It should allocate raw materials and production capacity
optimally to balance demand and plant capacity.

Bin Management
An ERP should have the facility to manage stock movement and inventory transactions for receiving,
picking, physical inventory counting, manufacturing material issues, and finished goods processing

Demand Planning
Demand planning is a multi-step operational supply chain management (SCM) process used to create
reliable forecasts. Effective demand planning can guide users to improve the accuracy of revenue
forecasts, align inventory levels with peaks and troughs in demand, and enhance profitability for a
given channel or product.

Distribution Management
The solution must provide real-time measurements of profitability by warehouse, product line,
location, and business unit. Distribution Management must handle the complexities of distribution
such as purchasing, ordering, tracking inventory, filling orders, and delivering customer support.

Event Management
The solution must reduce manual work and allow to easily define, assign and control all events'
activities. An Event Management Solution must allow the user to run the organization's events and
hospitality programs in the easiest and most beneficial way throughout the full event process.

Store In/Out
An ERP should have the functionality to record Store IN/OUT based upon data entry/barcode based
identification.

Lead-Time Management
An efficient ERP Module must reduce the lead time to the best possible extent. Lead time is the time
that elapses between the placing of an order (either a purchase order or a production order issued to
the shop or the factory floor) and actually receiving the goods ordered.
Partner Agreement Management
An ERP must provide a centralized channel for defining the enterprise's business agreements with
other business partners and stakeholders.

A comprehensive solution design should be provided to assist the enterprises in managing and
coordinating both new and existing collaboration agreements that identify the enterprise's core
business relationships.

Product Variants
Product variants should be configured products with their own product master record, in which the
configuration, that is, the characteristic value assignment, is stored.

From a business point of view, product variants represent the configurations that sell best; vendors
might want to have them in stock to make them readily available to customers at a favorable price.

Production Scheduling
A production scheduling system must translate a business plan with forecasted demand (sales
orders) into a workable production plan (supply orders). A typical production plan would consist of
planned orders in a multi-level (Bill of Material - BOM) scheduling environment.

Promotions Management
The solution should allow a promotion to be applied to the sales order transaction automatically,
thus relieving the sales team member from remembering the promotions.

Promotions are available for different clients, groups of clients, for specific items or groups of items.

Purchase-Order (PO) Processing

The PO functionality allows companies to maintain consistent stock levels, improve merchandise
quality and minimize costs by increasing accuracy and efficiency in their purchasing department.

The functionality allows companies to deal with real-world situations like partial shipments,
combined shipments or delayed invoices.

Replenishment
An ERP’s inventory replenishment process analyzes supply and demand across multiple companies
and facilities to help manufacturing and distribution organizations improve order and line item fill
rates and optimize their overall inventory management performance.

Requisition Management
The Requisition Management module allows the organization to organize and simplify complex
distribution processes involving multiple products and suppliers.

It should optimize the way the organization gather requests, obtain vendor bids, create quotes,
approve quotes, manage purchases, and fulfill orders for internal or external clients.

Requisition Self-Service
Requisition Self Service system should enable organizations to reduce management and
administrative functions for procurement by providing employees with a self-service program with
which they can enter their own requests for items such as office supplies.

Return Materials Authorizations (RMAS)

RMAs should integrate with credit memo, sales order, purchasing, and work order to allow a
seamless and effortless decision-making process for categorizing and documenting a customer return
in accordance with the company's policies to ensure that its customers receive goods that meet their
expectations with minimal delay

Serial/Lot Tracking
The solution must provide traceability by creating a lot number, serial number, or other grouping of a
part and automatically tracking each part as it flows from receiving through production and is
shipped to the organization's customers

Contract Management
The solution must offer the option to automatically take framework contracts from ERP system and
display them online.

The solution should offer following benefits:

-Improved communication with the suppliers

-No doubled entries thanks to complete ERP integration

-Faster processing end editing directly in the portal

-Improved overview of contract deviations

Subcontract Management
The solution must manage the movement of inventory going out to subcontractors and ensure its
returned according to individual job schedules.

The solution must have tight integration between production, purchasing and receiving, to know
exactly where subcontract components are, when there is a need to act and what is the work cost.

Supplier/Vendor Self-Service
Supplier Self-Service (SUS) is a solution that reduces the costs of procurement cycles by improving
the exchange of business documents and shortening the time it takes to process the content of these
documents.

Supplier/Vendor Performance Tracking

With the help of ERP, tracking vendor performance should be an easier task.

That strategy to track vendor/supplier performance should be built on some key performance
indicators (KPIs).

Transportation Management
A transportation management solution should enable the organization to proactively manage and
execute transportation processes such as invoicing, cost control, and foreign trade.

Warehouse Automation
The solution must include a completely integrated bar-code and label system, receiving, container
tracking, shipping, bin-moves, bin-replenishment, cycle counting, warehouse space utilization,
materials issues, back-flushing, labor entry, directed put-away, sales order entry, many picking
methods and much more.

Warehouse Management
A comprehensive warehouse management system must include:

-Total warehouse management, inventory control, finite bin and package definitions, task and load
management and inter-active, real-time management of activities and consumption.

-Multi-Channel order processing with automated EDI, kitting and item configuration.

-Inbound and outbound serial tracking, pick planning, consolidated picking, order pack-out, cross-
docking, carton packing, RFID, and manifesting interfaces.

 Sales-Order Management Requirements

Customer Credit Management

Credit Management functionality gives the organization an opportunity to know their customers
better in terms of financial facts and payment behavior.

Pricing
A competent module should incorporate prices list, trade policies, price management, prices
recalculation, changing prices, commercial adding.

Picking
An ERP should have the ability to efficiently perform picking & delivery operations. This may be with
the aid of Bar-Codes, QMR Codes, RFIDs etc.

Product Configurator
Product Configurator module must build new parts by starting with a base item and adding features
or options to it. New items can be created on the fly using customized item masks, new long and
short item descriptions, and other options.

Quotations
The solution must be able to produce accurate estimates, streamline the organization's quote-to-
cash cycle, calculate reliable estimates, and improve customer service. Quotes and sales orders
enable the vital coordination of activities between the organization's sales people, warehouses and
plants, shipping and accounting teams. They facilitate efficient management of accounts, shipping,
invoicing and commissions.
Sales-Order Processing
The solution must make sales order processing simple by handling all orders from one centralized,
user-friendly system. Efficient Module should have extensive configuration features that enable the
organization to optimize the sale order process to suit their business

 Inventory Management

Available-To-Promise (ATP)
An ATP tool is an all-encompassing analysis of operating hours, production and manufacturing time
requirements, machine availability, labor capacity, tooling readiness, and materials required. By
combining all aspects of what is required to manufacture a product ATP software module gives
manufacturer’s better visibility into completion within seconds through all levels and across the
entire supply chain.

Capable-To-Promise (CTP) Inventory

The availability of items in the organization's system is an important piece of information that is
necessary for planning future production and making sales commitments. It is therefore important
for an ERP to feature a CTP (capable-to-promise) functionality which should enable the organization
to understand as to how much can they promise to a new demand on a particular day, creating and
actually planning for that demand

Inventory Management
The solution must provide real-time visibility and control of materials and products.

Inventory Monitoring
An ERP must have the capability to monitor the inventory by managing every stage of the product
lifecycle, as well as different lines of business. The user must be able to manage inventory levels and
get stronger control of inventory operations.

 Accounting Requirements (Key Business)

Accounts Payable Reporting

Accounts Payables must possess efficient forms and reports

Accounts Payable
Accounts Payable feature for managing the organization’s expenditures and help them to raise
productivity through a dual grid entry screen and reporting capabilities

Accounts Receivables
ERP solution must provide Accounts receivable module and assist in maintaining customer
information, finding a customer, invoice and generating accounts receivable summary.
Bank Reconciliation
ERP solution must have a Bank Reconciliation feature to assist the enterprise in reconciling the
balance shown on the bank statement with the amount shown in the corresponding General Ledger
cash accounts.

Erp-To-Bank Interfaces And Integration

The solution must provide closer ERP-to-bank interfaces and integration.

Cash-Flow Management
The solution's Cash Flow Management module must enable cash flow forecasting, and
summarization of cash inflows and outflows.

Cost Management
The solution must provide a cost management system to allocate expenses and costs of processes
and products.

Automatic Cost Calculation

The solution must automatically calculate the cost from entered unit prices and quantities to reduce
redundant entries and risk of error.

Cost Calculation Method Selection

The solution must be capable of selecting a cost calculation method, automatically apply the unit
price, manage production expenses, create a baseline for production costs, and create cost reports.

Cost Analysis
The ERP must provide effective methods to predict, monitor, analyze, and manage the multiple costs
involved in various activities undertaken by an organization.

Fixed-Asset Management
The solution must provide information and tools necessary to manage assets' financial and tax
reporting.

Business & Tax Reporting

The solution must be capable of generating detailed business and tax reports

Multiple Depreciation Calculations

The solution must provide flexible depreciation calculations as well as standard depreciation
methods such as straight line, declining balance, variable declining balance, ARCS, MACRS, user
defined depreciation methods and more.

Risk Management
The solution should effectively predict, analyze and manage risks and crisis situations. On the basis of
various relevant parameters, it should also suggest Business Continuity Plans (BCP) in cases of
emergencies and unforeseen situations
Tax Management
The solution's Tax Management module must store system taxation settings and provide tax audit
and tax reporting functionalities. Taxation settings should be used across the system to provide
consistent collection of sales, use, and VAT taxes.

 Financial Requirements (Functional)

Advanced Allocations
The ERP's advanced allocation feature ramps up the organization's accounting system to capture the
financial intelligence that they need for more insightful analysis and planning.

Budgeting
Financial Module of an ERP must allow the organization to manage financial and analytical budgets

The solution should be able to manage budgets from three different point of views, according to the
user role:

-Accountant: Work on master or consolidated budget

-Project Manager: Work on analytical budgets on his projects

-Department Manager: Get a consolidated view on budget positions

Expense Management
The solution must provide ease of use, continuity in reporting, and correct G/L account assignment
of business related expenses. The Expense Reporting functionality of an ERP must simplify and
expedite the reporting and approval process.

General Ledger
The General Ledger module should be designed to handle most demanding budgeting and
processing needs. The feature should track budget and actual financial data to produce financial
statements such as an Income Statement and Balance Sheet, the Trial Balance Report, General
Ledger Report etc.

Invoicing/Billing
The solution must offer automated invoice creation by calculating sales tax, finance charges and
discounts based on payment terms, either on a one-time or recurring basis. From quote to order to
bill, the solution must manage the entire process with transaction creation and routing capabilities in
a single solution.

Multiple Currencies Support

The solution must support multiple currencies so that all transactions processed in foreign currencies
should be converted to the base currency, based on the exchange rate effective at the time of the
transaction. All transactions should then posted to the General Ledger in the base currency.
Multiple Languages Support
The solution should support multiple languages in order to propel the growth of an organization in
multiple geographies.

Regulatory Compliance Support

The solution must support the regulatory compliance framework of various countries and
geographies.

 Human Resources Requirements (Key Business)

Benefits Administration
The solution must provide a system for organization to administer and track employee participation
in benefits programs. These typically encompass insurance, compensation, profit sharing and
retirement.

Enterprises Compensation Management

The solution must provide complete solution for enterprise compensation management, budget
handling, compensation administration, long-term incentives, job pricing and reporting.

Standardize Process Based on Current configuration

The solution must standardize human resource processes as far as possible based on current
configuration and inputs from all departments in the organization

Human Resource Management

The solution’s HRM module must streamline all training, recruitment, payroll, and attendance
functionalities.

Payroll Integration with Rosters and Timesheets

The solution must fully integrate Payroll, Rosters and Timesheets.

Payroll Management
The solution must support an unlimited number of employees, user defined pay groups, pay types,
deductions and benefits.

Performance Management
The solution's Performance Management module must track and review development history for an
employee, share information with employees, management and the HR department through
workflow which made it visible to all the progress of events

Recruitment
The solution must identify and engage new talent; to help in hiring the right people thus reduce the
cost of recruiting.
 Human Resources Requirements (Functional)

Tax Administration: Payroll & Tax Filing

The solution must assist the users in payroll and tax filing.

Tax Administration: Personal Income Tax

The solution must support users in Personal Income Tax requisites.

Employee Self Service

The ERP solution should have a secure web-based module that empowers employees to view and
make updates to their own personal and benefits information without filling out forms and waiting
for the Human Resource department to enter it into the system.

Manager Self Service

The solution must provide managers access to information they need to operate, perform, and
decide in a better way. The solution must empower managers to oversee their employees and
budgets more efficiently.

Talent Management
The solution's Talent Management modules must enable managers to have the abilities to review
employees, plan for compensation adjustments based on a budget, and distribute learning materials
and see their effect.

Attendance
The solution must automate the time and attendance record-keeping process and provide an
intuitive, web-based interface for time entry and approval.

Timecard Management
The solution should offer a simplified way to submit, review, track and approve timecards.

Work-Force Planning
The Workforce Planning module must incorporate a long-term horizon, and aim to construct a broad
workforce strategy and specify categories of competencies.

Technology Requirements

 Supply Chain Management Requirements

Flexible Network Design

Network design harnesses supply chain optimization concepts to deliver the right service levels at
the lowest costs.

It takes a resilient supply chain to keep up with fast-changing market conditions and consumer
demands. The smallest failure at any point can cost valuable time and money. Likewise, small,
incremental improvements can yield a significant edge. Hence, a flexible network design can increase
the efficiency and scalability of a supply chain module.

Support For Radio Frequency (RF) Technology

The solution must have the capability to enter data and scan bar-code labels using radio frequency
(RF) devices.

 Customer Relationship Management Requirements

Mobile Access
An effective CRM Module of an ERP should facilitate users with the ease of access to ERP information
to perform their jobs on any device at any time. This requires the CRM solution to handle:

Different mobile devices and applications for different roles/jobs

Ability to be used by staff with limited computer or language skills, in adverse conditions (variable
lighting, distractions/interruptions, potential for device to be damaged.)

Sales Force Automation (SFA)

An effective module must integrate sales processes from opportunity, upsell and quote management
to sales forecasting, order management, fulfillment, and sales commission.

The solution must give sales team unprecedented visibility into every aspect of the customer
relationship, including support cases and back-office information such as contracts and inventory.

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

ERP should help in managing an enterprise's interactions with the organizations that supply the
goods and services it uses. For this purpose, ERP should have an efficient supplier relationship
management (SRM) that can streamline the processes between an enterprise and its suppliers, along
with making them more effective

- Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) software is integrated with a larger enterprise resource
planning (ERP) system

- Supplier relationship management (SRM) software can also use with customer relationship
management (CRM) software to speed order fulfillment

Workflow Management
The ERP solution should:

- shorten the lifecycle of more lengthy manual processes,

- automate workflow tasks for users,

- initiate approvals for workflow steps,

- track individual workflow documents throughout the process and

- assign email notification for workflow steps

 Requirements Related To Additional Applications

Business Process Management (BPM)

Business Process Management Software resolves these problems by transforming static, user-driven
ERP applications into powerful solutions that have the capability to automate virtually any business
process.

Document Management
Document management and delivery of ERP documents by email or fax can reduce paper
consumption, postage costs and storage.

An ERP should provide document management solutions in order to enable the organization to send,
receive, store, retrieve, and share ERP business documents.

It should also enable the organization to scan, index and store inbound and outbound documents,
and link them to provide significant improvements in productivity and customer service.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

For enterprises running complex equipment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, asset uptime is critically
important. Organizations must always have the right skilled labor and parts available at the right
time. The must also account for all financials relating to the inspection and maintenance of assets
throughout their lifecycle so that performance can be improved and costs minimized.

Any interruption in asset-intensive industries—due to plant or equipment failure—can result in lost

production that may be unrecoverable. The enterprise asset management components of the ERP
software are therefore very important for a manufacturing organization.

Field-Service Management
Management of field service operations demands a flexible, integrated software solution capable of
tackling a disparate network of users.

An ERP should therefore ease the complications encountered in a traditional or paper based field
service management arrangement. It should remove those complications with an integrated, high
performance software solution that can streamline the organization's field service management.

Knowledge Management
An ERP should efficiently manage corporate knowledge.

Increasing requirements for extended enterprises have stimulated the integration of knowledge
management (KM) function into ERP systems for knowledge asset management.

Due to the fact that both types of assets (physical & knowledge) need to be properly managed, the
integration of KM and ERP becomes a strategic initiative for providing competitive advantages to
enterprises.

Product Development
For nearly every step in the product development process, there is an operations function put in
place to better control and manage it. Adjacent functions, such as manufacturing, logistics,
distribution, inventory, shipping and accounting, each play a vital role in getting innovative new
products to market—and ultimately to customers—faster than competitors.

To be successful, an ERP must ensure that these functions are performed in sync with product
development efforts, a task made more difficult because it requires coordination between disparate
departments.

Project Management
An ERP should provide flexible Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) capabilities including multi-level
phases within a project. It should be built using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and should
also enable continuous performance initiatives, real-time connectivity and intuitive business
intelligence all the way to the organization's supply-chain partners, thus helping provide greater
business agility.

Project Scheduling
An ERP should have a Project Scheduling module which should integrate the project activities and
the human resources competencies, and should create a master project plan using an advanced
planning and scheduling algorithm

The module should work in connection with Project Accounting, Project Billing and the Human
Resources Management modules, and should integrate to the MS Project application and to the MS
Outlook scheduler, for quick decentralized time capture and schedule

 Other Important Tools

End-User Training Development Tools

An ERP should possess tools which may be used to develop training materials and other knowledge
repositories for its end users

Archiving Tools
ERP packages should provide the functionality to archive the database on a periodic basis in such a
way that the archived records are accessible to the end-users in case they are needed

Ad-Hoc Query Tool

ERP should also provide the functionality to retrieve results based on Ad-hoc/keyword based queries

 Integration

Module Integration
The ERP package should integrate between modules, so that all of the core business functions are
connected. Information should flow across the organization so that BI reports on organization-wide
results
Hardware And Other Applications Integration
The ERP should be capable to integrate hardware, applications, networking, supply chain and other
features

Integration With Handheld/Mobile Devices

An ERP should possess the functionality to integrate with handheld and mobile devices. It should
provide the key functionalities of ERP on mobile devices.

Integration With Portable Scanners

An ERP should also integrate with portable scanners, barcode/QR Code readers etc.

Integration With Fax Server

ERP packages should integrate with Fax servers in order to directly send/receive faxes directly
from/into the package

Integration With Barcode Generator

ERP packages should integrate well with barcode generators in order to create barcodes/QR codes
for goods produced by the company

 Additional Applications
BI (Business Intelligence)
The solution should have BI tools that allow users to share and analyze the data collected across the
enterprise and centralized in the ERP database.

Business Intelligence Dashboards

The solution should enable the users to retrieve BI in the form of dashboards which contain
automated reports and analysis tools used to monitor the organization's business performance.

Data Warehouse
The solution data warehouse feature must maintain central repositories of integrated data from one
or more sources so that information needed for supporting executive decision making is easily
available.

Data Archive
The solution must periodically archive the data which is not in use so as to keep the database size
manageable

Past Data Records

The solution must keep records for past information and separately maintain their data warehouse