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Tying It All Together
On a whiteboard in Tiab's office, IT has scrawled battle plans for the future. The company expects to finish its network rebuild by November. In early 2008, phase two will begin: a back-office system upgrade. Today the company still depends on its in-house-built Ican CRM legacy system. Each center keeps its own client database. The Web site and call centers are isolated from one another.
"The systems don't talk to one another now," Tiab says. "To grow as a company, we have to have intelligent data. With the current system, we have a gap."
Jenny Craig is selecting a vendor to deploy a CRM system as the centerpiece of a unified platform that includes a single database with greater redundancy, scalability and reporting tools, as well as a new Web site. All these elements will rest on the new WAN. "The client will be able to receive Jenny Craig any way they want," Tiab says.
The company runs J.D. Edwards/Oracle for financials. Over the next two years, it plans to upgrade that application and add the vendor's human resources system and also expand the accounting software to manage the supply chain for the company's warehouse and 12 distribution centers. Tiab is also searching for a talent management system (TMS) to plug into the new centrally managed and service-oriented architecture-based infrastructure. Such a massive upgrade wouldn't be possible without the new WAN.
"The expansion becomes the next stage for us," says Tiab. "We're building a system for multiple languages -- multinational under one umbrella. We're building the technology to have a foundation to exist as either Jenny Craig or any other name under weight loss. It empowers us for growth but allows us to add the rest of the pieces down the road."
Tiab also hopes the TMS will reduce employee training costs and increase staff retention, which, coupled with the CRM system, will strengthen relationships with customers. "We fly people all over the nation to conduct training in person," he says. "We need to retain our employees because they have a relationship with our customers. Without a central database, we can't phone clients and say, 'What's going on?' Soon we'll have a 360-degree view of clients [so we can ask], 'What is making you leave? How can we make it better?'"
Ultimately, Tiab says, the company's IT investment will enable the business to scale internationally and build a culture of continuous improvement.
"One year down the road, the back office will look a lot different," Tiab says. "We're building a Web-based system that will provide a seamless view of our clients through the lifecycle regardless of the channel. It will take us within a year to become a billion-dollar company."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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