Advertisment

FORE students develop analytical CRM package

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update



NEW DELHI: The students of the FORE School of Management have come up with an Analytical Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package. Developed under the guidance of Dr S Chandrasekhar, chair professor, Information Technology and chairperson, Software Development Center, FORE, the package is being made available at half the price of SAS Analytical CRM package.



"The same set of data fed to the SAS Analytical CRM package and the version developed by the students, yielded the same output, according to our test runs," said Dr Chandrasekhar, "with a 0.5 per cent deviation." "I can confidently claim that our product is as good as SAS, if not better," he added.



CRM analytics comprises of programming that analyzes data about an enterprise's customers and presents it so that better and quicker business decisions can be made. It can be considered a form of online analytical processing (OLAP) and may employ data mining.



CRM analytics can provide customer segmentation groupings, profitability analysis, personalization, event monitoring, what-if scenarios and predictive modeling. CRM analytics finds a vast area of application in the BFIS, retail, customer services verticals among others.



One of the major challenges implicit in CRM analytics is how to integrate the analytical software with existing legacy systems as well as with other new systems. How is FORE planning to tackle the same? "The CRM package works in the Windows NT and 2000 environment, but is not adapted to UNIX or LINUX-based environment," said Dr Chandrasekhar.



 



"We have no plans of developing the core Operational CRM, but would rather enter into alliance with companies already offering the same. Global Groupware Solutions and Talisman are two Indian companies we have in mind," he further informed. "We also have plans of overseas marketing," he added.



Incidentally, Siebel, SAS and SAP are all global players in the CRM field. Eight MCA and two MBA students worked for one and a half years in developing the prototype and the coding of the desi version informed Dr Chandrasekhar. His consultancy fees notwithstanding, which Dr Chandrasekhar is not charging, the R&D spent Rs 4 lakh on the project. The students were given a scholarship of Rs 5,000 per month.



"Since our development costs have been so little, we can penetrate the CRM market by pricing our product really low," said Dr Chandrasekhar answering a question from CNS on the marketing plans. And how low is 'really low'? Dr Chandrasekhar refused to divulge specifics at the moment, but was confident that for a global CRM package at say X, the desi version could comfortably be priced at X/2.



"The analysis model works on the principle of Database Coring. In a heterogeneous sample of x units, there is more disorder than order, as the individual units will have varying attributes," explained Dr Chandrasekhar. "If we now divide the universe into subgroups based on a particular attribute, the degree of disorder present in the subgroups will be lesser than that present in the original universe. The subgroups are considered as universes and further divided," he continued.



"Lets say for a class of 120 students, we divide the population into groups according to their sex, then further split the same according to age, then further by say marks secured and so on. At each stage, there is a separation happening according to the best available attribute," he said.



tech-news