Conceptualization and Development of a Supply Chain-Customer Relationship Management (SC2R-M) Synergy Mode

Abstract

The ability of an organisation to add on a service envelope to the core product, overcome the constraints related to time and place of delivery and thereby, satisfying the customers’ need with an edge over the other players or competitors in the market place, is the prime concern in today’s context. This could take several forms as those branding with unique benefits, extensive knowledge exchange between organisation and customers, control of intellectual properties, exclusive supplier-buyer interface and relationship management with customers, employees and other value chain partners resulting in streamlining the flow of entire supply chain. SCM seeks to optimize supply whereas CRM seeks to optimize demand. SCM is cost focused and deals with production and execution while CRM is revenue focused and involves identifying and responding to customer needs. In this paper, we propose and try to analyze the synergistic approach of supply chain management with customer relationship management (SC2R-M). The paper starts with tracing the development of CRM and SCM, focusing the (SC2R-M) synergistic mode followed by a proposed model, which depicts the specific inputs for customer and organisation, as to how customer processes the data, what are the efforts of organisation for relationship with customers, employees and channel members, what are the connecting links of focal firm with customer and finally what would be the outputs of focal firm’s (SC2R-M) synergistic efforts in terms of benefits derived by customers and focal firm and ultimately by business and society.

Keywords: Supply Chain, CRM, SC2R-M, Synergy Mode, Marketing.

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