SMILE - SME oriented Method for Successful CRM implementations with Low Effort

Incremental implementation methodology for CRM systems

The use of standard software for sales and marketing has reached wide acceptance in the industry and has had a radical impact on business organisations in recent years. The organisational paradigm known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has gained strong recognition: CRM postulates, that an organisation needs to actively manage its customer relation, aiming to develop the relationship along a defined customer life-cycle with the goal of conducting repetitive, profitable business.

In an increasingly competitive environment, customer satisfaction is one of the key elements in achieving this goal.

The project SMILE aims to develop an incremental implementation methodology for CRM systems, which is especially tailored to the requirements of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

The targets of SMILE

IST-2001-34376

• To promote novel aspects of customisability requirements for organisational standard applications.
• To propagate the adoption of user centred implementation principles, by advocating an incremental approach.
• To aim at development of an implementation approach for CRM systems targeted to SMEs, to accelerate the modernisation of European SMEs and to support their transformation to a competitive organisation in a networked economy.
• To develop a detailed and differentiated view on CRM implementation obstacles in SMEs.

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• To help in identifying opportunities for novel services for the implementation of CRM applications and for novel technical architectures required for products.
• To allow SMEs to gain faster entrance into the networked economy, with less implementation effort and with a higher success rate.

Based on experiences with implementation methodologies for CRM and ERP applications

Contacts for this project

Spiros Alexakis

SMILE will be based on experiences with implementation methodologies for CRM and ERP applications, which have proven valuable, developed by the major ERP package vendors and their consulting partners. But while these have proven valuable in large-sized enterprises, they have to be considered as insufficient for SMEs in the context of CRM implementations. 

SMILE shall tackle these obstacles. The main characteristic of SMILE is an iterative implementation approach, known as "spiral model" in software engineering and which is favored from other authors for standard software implementations. 

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