Condensed Cycles
Oracle recently unveiled a new application that’s designed to shorten product release cycles and enhance CRM functionality.
Oracle Quality Online is a Customer Relationship Management module that seems to slot comfortably into Oracle’s range of e-business applications, serving to affirm their continued forays into the realm of CRM solutions. Oracle maintained that, as an ASPs (application service provider) solution, Quality Online would avoid the traditional high price, complex implementation and maintenance hassles avoided with most CRM products.
As the business landscape becomes increasingly electronic and competitive, product release cycles are becoming increasingly shorter. Key to speeding up the process and increasing the bottom line, opines Oracle, is including engineering or R&D in the customer service workflow process. “Engineering is clearly the crux of any product development activity; however, it typically has been a stand-alone department, having little contact with customer service or marketing,” noted Oracle senior vice president Mark Barrenechea.
As an envisioned panacea to this disconnect, Oracle Quality Online aims to integrate usually disparate divisions such as product marketing, customer service and engineering into the CRM mix. Bringing all these distinct elements into the same loop could induce information sharing, allowing users to speedily identify problems in the current product release.
Ultimately, maintains Barrenechea, their new-fangled app would help streamline the process of bringing the next release or version of a product to market, making it speedier and easier than ever before.
By linking customer service input with the engineering function and incorporating internal information about product defects and enhancements, Quality Online promises to facilitate a culture of information sharing. “This will help identify problems, shorten product release cycles, and allow companies to remain competitive in an increasingly high-speed business environment,” he concluded.
Reprinted from www.sa.internet.com.