From Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ) to Supplier Relationship Management ( SRM )

In today’s extremely competitive environment, companies are investigating new means of increasing profit by implementing so called Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs). But the needs to continually cut costs and focus on core competencies has led companies to focus on how to improve the supply chain and leverage their supply base. Many have shift from a vertical integration model to outsourcing some or all of their production [13] to gain the necessary competitive edge, but this inevitably creates new needs as coordination costs increases dramatically. In addition, the recent craze on e-catalogues, auctioning and e-rfp has heavily contributed to question the need for long-term buyer/seller relationship. The goal of this paper is therefore to investigate solutions companies could put in place to leverage their suppliers using, what is now called: Supplier Relationship Management Systems (SRMs). This will be achieved by illustrating the key functionalities such systems should offer. To avoid reinventing the wheel, we have based our work on the one performed in the CRM field starting from the assumption that both areas are investigating the same problem but in an