XRM: CRM as a Platform

What is XRM?

Where CRM (C = Customer) is focused on managing relationships with customers, XRM (X = Anything) is the platform where you define and manage the relationships between anything important for your organization to manage information around.

XRM is the development platform the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application was built on. In addition to Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s rich “out of the box” CRM functionality, XRM is the platform that gives you the foundation to mold Microsoft Dynamics CRM into line-of-business (LOB) solutions – a true application platform where you define the “things” and relationships unique for your end-to-end business operations.

XRM is the same platform that underlies Microsoft Dynamics CRM today.

Evolution of CRM

CRM software has become a necessity for many organizations, enabling them to more effectively manage their customer relationships.

As CRM matured, companies came to realize that an effective CRM solution must:

• Be highly flexible to meet the needs of the business.
• Allow them to manage a wide range of entities, not just customers, leads, prospects, contacts, and support cases; but any “thing” important for a business to capture and manage information around.
• Allow them to define the “things” (people, products, services, money) important to their business and manage the interactions between these relationships.
• Automate business processes across these relationships to create a true line-of-business (LOB) platform that streamlines operations across the organization.

The result was a new generation of CRM that is highly flexible, automated, and customizable; in effect, a platform for CRM. With XRM you do not have to make important trade-offs between buying packaged or building specialized line-of-business applications, because XRM offers an end-to-end, line-of-business application development platform that combines the best of both worlds. XRM enables organizations to build any number of end-to-end line-of-business applications rapidly and cost-effectively.

Sample XRM Solutions

Companies can mold Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage “anything” they define within the XRM platform. Visibility into the relationships and interactions between these “things” streamline operations across the organization – any organization