اعمال اطلاعات کسب و کار در اندازه های کوچک برای شرکت های سودمند Business Intelligence applied in Small Size for Profit Companies

1. Introduction. CRM and Business Intelligence As we pointed out in one of our previous contributions, Business Intelligence is quite often strictly related to CRM, Customer Relationship Management that anyway should not be considered in any way only a technology. In fact – despite the technological aspect regarding the nature of CRM may be still very much widespread – we were able to capitalize on the contributions of many authors, such as Coltmann (2011), Lambert (2009), Lazer (1997), Hasan (2003), Walter Scott (2001) and finally Baran (2013), to state how CRM should be considered a real strategy that nowadays all for-profit companies should adopt for their survival and development. With this outlook on CRM we also explained the key role of customer retention to implement a CRM strategy, referring to some important contributions such as Zineldin’s (2006), who coined the rather impressing slogan, “The Royalty of Loyalty,” and who states, “A company has to create customer relationships that deliver value beyond… the core products. This involves adding tangible and intangible elements to the core products, thus creating and enhancing the product surrounding. Customer loyalty is an important function to ensure the fulfilment of given customer requirements and companies’ profits, survival and competitive positioning.” We then analyzed Business Intelligence and we found quite a different situation. In fact firstly, there is no confusion in definitions as we have in the case of CRM; for instance Luhn’s (2010) defines it: ‘An automatic system developed to disseminate information to the various sections of any industrial, scientific or government organization. This intelligence system will utilize data-processing machines for auto-abstracting and auto-encoding of documents and for creating interest profiles for each of the action points in an organization’. Beyond this, the fundamental importance of BI to businesses seems to be fully appreciated; in fact according to Moss (2008), ‘In today’s highly competitive and increasing uncertain world, the quality and timeliness of an organization’s business intelligence (BI) can mean not only the difference between profit and loss, but even the difference between survival and bankruptcy.’ Finally, we highlighted the fundamental contribution by Pennarola (2006), who gives one of the more complete representations of a CRM system that is very effectively summarized in Figure 1 which also displays the vital interconnections between the operative and analytic components, two separate parts that nonetheless have to be fully and constantly integrated.In fact, in this way, it is possible to integrate a standard database with all possible relevant data so to build up an advanced customer warehouse, the indispensable pre-requisite for advanced Business Intelligence. As we already said in the abstract, rather than focusing on all aspects, we considered only profitability and customer satisfaction level that, nevertheless, seem to us of the utmost importance.