Hello, I've just started work with Pratham Books [1] and they are a non-profit organization and are the largest publishers of children's books in India and publish over a million copies of a hundred titles in over twelve languages each year.
As part of my work, I'm helping to try and institute systems for CRM and SCM because we work with many local branch offices, printers/publishers and customers scattered over the country and as of today, we have a major issue in not being able to see data on stock in hand/in transit/in publication etc and this severely hampers our ability to fulfill orders in any meaningful way. Our current method relies more on Excel sheets, telephone calls and a whole lot of faith. The only piece of good news is that we have a UIN for all our books, in the form of an ISBN. Ideally, such SCM and CRM systems will be web based because it would be near impossible to maintain an application on users' computers across the country. I have been evaluating Salesforce [2] for CRM in terms of Donor and Pledge management and it seems to be just what we need. However, it is pretty weak (and please correct me if I am wrong) in terms of inventory management. Hence, I've been using Zoho CRM [3] and it seems to be an ideal starting point for us for inventory management. What we're now looking at doing is enabling online sales of our books. We have a rudimentary system [4] but it does not allow for online payment nor does it take in to account SKU availability. Is there a simple way of setting up an online sales and payment portal that also takes in to account inventory available? Also, is there a way I can/should combine inventory/SCM management and CRM/donor management? Lastly, would you have ideas as to novel distribution channels we can look at tapping in to such that we can get our books to as many children as possible? We currently use a combination of internal, NGO/INGO and government channels. No real private/corporate channels as we simply don't have anything to offer, in terms of mark-up, to the channel. I'm wondering, and hoping, that Silk might be able to provide some guidance and assistance. Cheers! Gautam [1] http://prathambooks.org/ [2] http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/product [3] http://crm.zoho.com [4] http://prathambooks.org/order.htm
