UGC strives for CRM perfection

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Worldwide publishing giant United Communications Group (UGC) has embarked on a complex digital dashboard project aimed at improving customer relationship management (CRM) and business efficiency.

The project, which involves automating both front and back office operations, is thought to be the largest worldwide implementation of this type of on-demand CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology.

Once complete, the company hopes to have a more holistic view of business operations.

It has already completed the first phase of the initiative by implementing NetSuite's ERP offering in its finance division in addition to using the vendor's CRM technology across its sales and customer support teams.

It now plans to extend its use of the CRM technology across other business divisions in the coming months.

So far, the technology has eliminated transactional errors financial and customer-oriented.

The company is also making use of a role-based dashboard to divisionally present real time views of key business indicators such as orders, sales and forecasts.

"With a consolidated view of our customers, products, and business, the days of having multiple versions of the same customer record are over," said Del Brockett, chief operating officer of UCG.

"The value we are going to drive from that is huge. NetSuite also provides UCG a strong acquisition and integration platform for the organization; this is key to the support of UCG's active M&A efforts."

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.