Design Of Web And Middleware Based Flexible Customer Relationship Management System

Customer relationship management(CRM) firstly is an advanced management concept focusing on customers, while customer relationship management system is an application system helping enterprise to implement this management concept. The main attitude of our paper is to present a solution to a customer relationship management system. Evaluating our solution as a whole, it mainly has three characteristics, which are open and flexible system architecture, EAI based designing concept, flexible and reasonable module and function arrangement.Most of the current CRM systems are based on C/S architecture, which are obturated, lack of flexibility and highly costing to implement. While in the time of Web, CRM itself is in evolution, therefore, CRM with old architecture cannot meet the demands any more. After analysing the evolution of distributed architecture, we find out that the architecture based on web and middleware is the most advanced and popular one. In our paper, we alse introduce the two main platforms that implement this architecture, and analyse the characteristics of these two platforms.CRM is a complex application system, while most of the current CRM systems are designed as independent systems, we regard this as a misunderstanding. Our CRM solution is based on the concept of enterprise application Integration(EAI) according to the following two reasons: firstly, we think CRM covers lots of aspects of enterprise activities, and it is hard to implement the functionalities all by CRM itself; secondly, many resources of an enterprise can be shared, sometimes, CRM needs to share the resources managed by other systems, and sometimes, other systems need to share the resources managed by CRM. In our paper, after fully analysing many enterprise level application systems, we introduce the scenario of CRM integrating with workflow management system(WFMS), document management system(DM), data mining system, ERP system, PDM system and knowledge management system(KM). For example, in our paper, we integrate CRM with WFMS to automatize the 'publish', 'check out', 'check in' operation of contact and customer problem solving service; with DM to manage the related documents of customers, products and contacts; With data mining system to analyze the relations among products, to segment the customers and to predict customer behaviors ; with ERP to share customers and sales resources; with PDM to share products resources; with KM to build and take advantage of service knowledge warehouse.Flexibility is one of the most important characteristics of our CRM solution, it includes three aspects. First of all, the open and flexible distributed architecture is one aspect, which is the foundation of the flexibility. Secondly, when integrating CRM with other application systems, we introduce component based integration(CBI) which means the joint part of CRM and other system will be designed as a component, CRM will depent on the component interface to use the functions of the system to be integrated, while CRM shouldn't directly depent on the system itself. Lastly, the modules of CRM are designed flexibly, for instance, while implementing customer, product and contact information management, we design 'customer template', 'product template' and 'contact template' to customize customer, product and contact properties; and our product version management scenario can meet different demands, and so on.The functions and modules we designed are also reasonable and adaptable, they are designed in accordance with the deep understanding of the national CRM market and demand. For example, in sales management module, we design 'simple sale acitivity' and 'complex sale activity' to simulate the different kind of sale activities; in contact management module, we design contact 'publish', 'check out' and 'check in' workflow to automatize the approval process of contact; in macketing management module, we design 'one to one marketing', 'database marketing' and 'relationship marketing' to accomplish different kind of marketing activities;...