CONTROL 2010 continues to be an island in the ERP industry, needing more integration to sell more. Cincom Call Center legacy system integrated to Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The development of Cincom Call Center legacy system integration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM would take realistically over a year but not 18 months. The effort and expense would be an eight on a scale of ten and the unambiguous nature of the project would be a 10. The project would be viewed as visible with a score of 10 and a meaningfulness ranking of 10. This is another project that would be significant in that it would show the culture of the company changing significantly to adopt 3rd party technology (Mueller, 2009).

Development of Oracle database integration for CONTROL 2010 and Acquire 2010

As with other Cincom products, there is a lack of integration with them that severely limits their salability. The timeframe to make CONTROL 2010 and Acquire 2010 compatible with Oracle databases would be less than nine months and have a qualitative assessment of 10. The unambiguous success of the project is 10 as is the visibility and meaningfulness.

Development of a reseller strategy in the U.S. that generates over 30% of total revenue

Cincom has for decades struggled with creating a reseller channel and the current effort will take at least three years to see fruition. The qualitative assessment of this effort is 10 and the unambiguous success however is 5, there are many factors in any reseller relationships the company cannot control. The visibility and meaningfulness of the win is 9 as the company has significant investments in its installed base of direct sales-based accounts.

Real-time analytics that show the performance of Web-based marketing campaigns across all five product...

This can be accomplished in less than sixty days with a level of effort rating at 7, and an unambiguous success rating of 10, along with a meaningfulness level of 10 as well. As the Cincom culture turns to metrics often to make decisions this is a high priority product.
Assessment of the Top Five Projects

Based on an analysis of the seven alternatives the following five have been chosen:

Product Introduction Plan for the next generation of Cincom Acquire 2010 that coordinates with Europe and Australia

Integration of Cincom CONTROL:2010 with SAP ERP System

Cincom Call Center legacy system integrated to Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Development of Oracle database integration for CONTROL2010 and ACQUIRE 2010.

Real-time analytics that show the performance of Web-based marketing campaigns across all five product divisions

Taken together these alternatives deliver exceptionally high returns, especially those that bring outside technology into Cincom to change a long-standing mindset of using their own systems and platforms. The use of analytics applications to track strategy performance is going to be critical as the company relies on Web-based advertising to grow its markets.