Room for Improvement
5/2/2007
The consumer goods (CG) industry has invested a lot of time and money over the years to improve planning processes and the resulting forecasting accuracy, but have things really improved? Most of the attention on demand-driven initiatives has resulted in increased attention to the supply chain planning process, with promising early results, but the account planning process has been largely ignored. Management of customer relationships and the related forecasting activities are generally considered to be part of the CRM process and the CG industry has certainly adopted CRM applications en masse.
This month, we take a different approach to research as we partner with Perficient to assess the level of account planning maturity within the CG industry. Have CRM implementations addressed account planning processes adequately? Are the appropriate processes in place, regardless of technology? What we found isn't surprising: There is a wide range of capabilities with a lot of room for improvement.