New customer onboarding is a critically important component of the quote-to-cash process orchestration. For many organizations it can promote and increase customer satisfaction as well as reduce revenue risk and quote-to-revenue cycle time. New customer onboarding is triggered when the prospect becomes an actual customer by accepting a proposal or approving a quote.
New customer onboarding is often a very cross-functional process involving sales, customer service, logistics, finance/accounting teams and does not end until customer receives value from your organization. Value can be in the form of goods received, services provided, or going into production (for software, software-as-a-service scenarios). It is in the best interest of the whole organization to complete all onboarding activities properly and fully as soon as possible so that the new customer is satisfied. Your company’s cashflow, time-to-revenue and profitability depend on this fact.
Below is an example workflow designed in ZMDM to support New Customer Onboarding.
Customer Master Data
Key to onboarding new customers is accurate master data about customers that can be used by different stakeholders in your organization to know more about the new customer, evaluate risk and prepare so that they can serve the customer well. There are different facets of customer master data depending upon the type of customer, business and industry.
Below is the customer master information in SAP.
The account master (represents a customer or potential customer) in Salesforce, for example, looks substantially different from the customer master in SAP and is usually much simpler than the customer master in ERP/Finance solutions.
ZMDM’s customer master data model is a flexible customer master data model that supports multiple systems (CRM, ERP, Commerce, Supply Chain Planning etc.) and as a result will often have more information that what is needed for creating customer masters in a single system like SAP or Salesforce.
Creating and Updating Customer Master Data in Multiple Systems as part of Workflow
Once the Customer creation is approved ZMDM creates the customer master using the SAP integration activity highlighted below “Create Customer Master”. ZMDM’s workflow engine that can seamlessly incorporate people activities (preparation, approvals, reviews…) and system integration activities in a single workflow. In the workflow below the activity “Change Account Status in Salesforce”, ZMDM updates the Account status in Salesforce within the same workflow.
