In China, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for more than 90% of all enterprises, growing at an annual rate of 25%, and contributing to 50% of the GDP. Many SMEs commonly face issues such as low office efficiency, insufficient market information, lack of customer resources, and poor decision-making adaptability. In the face of fierce market competition, if enterprises want to survive and develop, they must strengthen their own management and improve the economic management efficiency to adapt to a highly changing market environment. The construction of enterprise informatization has emerged accordingly, becoming an important means to enhance the overall management level of enterprises. As a result, a number of management software vendors have appeared, offering a wide range of financial software, inventory management systems, CRM, OA, etc., leaving SMEs bewildered and unclear about which management software is suitable for their own enterprises. They may choose one blindly, only to find out that it falls far short of their expectations when actually used. Confused and lost, they wonder what kind of management software can truly help solve practical enterprise management problems?
To help SMEs find the right path in choosing management software more clearly, let's first take a look at the development history, current status, and future of China's management software industry.
I. Development History, Current Status, and Future of China's Management Software Industry
There have been two revolutions in the field of enterprise management informatization: using ERP, financial software, and inventory management systems to manage accounts and money well was the first informatization revolution; the second informatization revolution involves using collaborative software like CRM and OA to enhance the management of internal organizational operations, focusing on people and events.
First Informatization Revolution: Managing Money
1. Software related to accounts introduced ERP. What is ERP?
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning (enterprise resource planning), a concept initially proposed by Gartner Group. It went through the development process from MIS (Management Information System) enterprise information management system --- MRP (Material Requirement Planning) material requirements planning --- MRP II (Manufacture Resource Planning) production manufacturing resource planning --- ERP enterprise resource planning.
It can be seen that anything involving ERP centers around material, procurement, and production management. The hardest part of production management to control is cost accounting. General ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and inventory management are all key factors in the cost accounting process. Let’s take a look at existing ERP vendors:
Foreign: SAP, Oracle – too expensive for SMEs to bear.
Domestic: Digital China, Tiansi, UFIDA, Kingdee – these are relatively well-known domestic ERP vendors, but very few systems truly involve cost accounting, and even if they do, they are quite unstable. Each enterprise's production management process is different, leading to different demands, which forces vendors to continuously modify their software to meet customer requirements, exhausting their development and research costs. The result is that the software isn't improved, but instead, the vendor is dragged down.
Therefore, we can affirm that in China, there are no branded production management systems.
2. Besides ERP, software related to accounts also includes inventory management and financial software.
ERP: Unstable cost accounting
Inventory Management: A dynamic management process during enterprise management involving procurement (in), warehousing (storage), and sales (sales). Two major domestic leaders in this area are Jiaguangbao and Suda, holding 80% of the market share.
Financial Software: Mainly focuses on managing corporate financial accounts, corporate funds accounts, and corporate income and expenditure conditions, serving as simple data organization. Major domestic vendors include Jiaguangbao (Finance & Trade Integration), Suda, UFIDA, and Kingdee.
Unstable ERP cost accounting, inventory management centered on product records of the entire business flow process, financial software with three tables for full amount statistics, completely unrelated to business, and financial statistics being done monthly, resulting in severe lag in expense management. Management software related to accounts can only serve as backend support for enterprise operations, helping to improve efficiency but not fundamentally solving core issues affecting enterprise growth.
Second Informatization Revolution: Managing People and Events
Software unrelated to accounts includes CRM, OA (Office Automation), KM (Knowledge Management), HR, BI (Business Intelligence), etc.
1. What is CRM?
CRM: Customer Relationship Management. Literally speaking, it manages customer relationships. This is why in 1999, many vendors equated CRM with E-sales, E-service, E-marketing department-level event management.
Events are done by people within an organization. To perform well, people need to be managed properly. Considering China's national conditions, Chinese SMEs need more than just department-level event management; they need enterprise-level customer-centric operational management, which is the true meaning of CRM.
2. CRM Development History
1999~2002: Bubble stage, localized CRM entering China. A large number of CRM vendors emerged.
2002~2004: Bubble burst stage, development hindered, looking good but not useful. Many enterprises were still exploring.
2004~2007: CRM return stage, department-level applications recognized.
2007~Present: New generation collaborative CRM focused on people, business, and customers, leading the CRM trend. Superbo CRM, based on a human-centered design philosophy, covers customer & business management, product management, performance management, process management, and office management, achieving integration of CRM, OA, KM, and HR from a software perspective. Additionally, Superbo offers SMS group sending interfaces, email group sending interfaces, and telephone recording systems to facilitate call pop-up screens and features like opportunity management and finding clients.
For more details, refer to: http://www.vcb.cn/crm
3. CRM vs OA
OA, office automation management, literally means managing work processes through office automation and archive management. Abroad, front-end management requirements differ from those in China, so there is no concept of OA. Domestically, some well-performing OA vendors include Fanwei (good products but just functional modules without soul), Zhiyuan (only a simple workflow), Tongda, and Beijing Jinhe. These vendors' OA systems are completely disconnected from customers and organizational behavior, merely serving as auxiliary tools to improve office efficiency. On the other hand, CRM, as a soulful enterprise operation management software, will inevitably replace OA to become a Front Office suitable for China's national conditions.
4. CRM vs KM, HR
KM and HR are considered luxury products for SMEs, unaffordable. Superbo CRM, with unlimited user numbers, purchased once for lifetime use, priced between 3,000 to 30,000 RMB, is affordable for SMEs.
SAAS CRM: Software-as-a-Service, a software application model providing services over the Internet. After developing rapidly since 2003, domestic software vendors like UFIDA, Kingdee, Alibaba, even Microsoft and IBM have entered the Chinese SAAS market. In 2010, Alibaba announced abandoning SAAS, indicating that SAAS's path in China is not smooth. First, early SAAS was ASP, technologically immature, lacking customization and integration functions, quickly bursting the bubble. Second, SAAS places company resources uniformly on the vendor's server, where the vendor implements and maintains them. Chinese people are reluctant to entrust important resources to others, and maintenance services are inconvenient. Third, SAAS charges based on rented software modules, making operations troublesome and unable to complete everything at once. Fourth, SAAS lacks local service providers, making communication extremely inconvenient. X-tools software domestically also belongs to the SAAS model.
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