Sage CRM What is It?
Posted by Alistair Hill on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 @ 01:59 PM
SageCRM is probably one of the most poorly named products in the Sage lineup. While being straight to the point as far as identifying what the product is, it also paints the product into a corner as to what it can really do. CRM stands for "Customer relationship management", which out of the box is most certainly a function of SageCRM, but it absolutely does not stop there.
Where the C in CRM stands for customer, there is the implication of accounts receivables. Because your customers are in AR, right? Sure, but what if you only have AP? SageCRM applies the same logic to your vendors as it does your customers and thus making it also a VRM, although a quick Internet search shows that VRM is general not a typical acronym in this context.
We've added V, but what else can we do? Let's add a few fields to the user record, like birthday, hire date etc, and now we've added H for Human Resources. We can customize the appointment interface a bit and now we have scheduling. Another customization to send details to an Accpac invoice and now we have Time and Billing.
So what are we up to? C for Customer, V for Vendor, H for human, and TBS for Time and Billing. Not your typical CRM software and we're not even done yet. Right out of the box, SageCRM has a Cases module. Lets rename Cases to Workorders (cause you can do that), and now you have Service Management software.
There is almost no limit to the information that you can track in SageCRM; it is not just limited to Customers. With a little imagination, you can change that C to almost any letter combination you want.