Business is a general term used for all activities performed by your organisation to provide services or products to customers in your target markets with the utmost efficiency in order to create profit for your organisation and benefits to your customers.

If we apply the "where, what, why and how..." analysis to any business we can group the entire business concept into the following general components:

EFFICIENCY is an integrated and structured software designed to achieve the Objectives by managing the Organisation, Market, Customer and Transaction components of any business as a single source and seamlessly integrated to the existing or future core Financial, Office and Communication systems.

This was our goal when we conceptualised EFFICIENCY in 1985. When we released the first version in 1988, we defined it as a TOTAL BUSINESS and CLIENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

EFFICIENCY provides all the methods and tools to access and manage your business in a customer-centric approach (TOTAL CLIENT MANAGEMENT) as well as from a business-centric approach acting as a total front end of your core financial and manufacturing systems (TOTAL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT). These two approaches are presented as a single and unified concept.

At last count, there were appoximately 2000 CRM systems on the world market; almost all of them appeared like mushrooms since 1998 as part or result of the "dot com" hysteria. The older software systems, mostly simple contact managers, or specialised applications such as call centre, service, maintenance, membership management, have claimed to be CRM systems after undertaking small face lifts usually provided with the windows and SQL database developments. More recent and focused CRM vendors with large capitalisation and globalisation objectives are charging totally inflated prices for their services.

It is well documented that around 60 percent of the CRM projects are failures; and there are many well documented reasons. A major reason is a typical CRM system is no more than a contact manager front-end and data integrator for too many other systems focusing mostly the customer side of the business and fails to improve other business components. Usually, excessive project and the re-invention of the business are required as most of the CRM systems are implemented by the external consultants rather than the authors of the software. A truly successful and beneficial CRM system can still be obtained by the larger enterprises with large sums of budgets to spare.

EFFICIENCY is a TOTAL BUSINESS AND CLIENT MANAGEMENT solution incorporateing all Customer Relations Management (CRM) concepts since 1988. However, unlike most other CRM systems it also maintains and executes most of its own data and functions before feeding processed information to the existing financial and production systems, especially the components of the business other than the customer related ones. The main objective of EFFICIENCY is to increase the efficiency and productivity of the enterprise at all levels. This hands-on and ready-to-operate configuration and wholistic concept immediately lowers the cost of the current implementation and consultancy tasks as well as the cost of the changes and the inherent errors of any new development.

If any changes or customisation are required, the parameter driven programming and database objects in EFFICIENCY, developed and refined over the last 15 years, make customisation and implementation changes very simple, quick and possible without any programming requirements only using the database and form painters.

Today, 13 years strong, continuously being enhanced to maintain a high level of up-to-the-minute technology and business requirements, if we have to follow the market trends and refer EFFICIENCY as CRM then we may have to re-define it as CRM ON STEROIDS.