Moore Medical Corporation is a medical products distribution company serving many customer segments, including podiatrists, dentists, and emergency physicians. Linda Autore, CEO of Moore, is assessing whether and how to expand its IT capabilities further. Specifically, she is considering two options - (i) a CRM system, and (ii) an add-on module to their existing ERP system - in the hopes of improving Moore's demand planning and expanding/retaining its customer base.

Autore feels that their current IT system helps answer several key questions about the customers. However, she is unable to determine why Moore's "share of wallet" (the amount a customer spends on Moore's products versus the amount he/she spends in total) is low for some customer segments. Moreover, Autore does not know why customers often leave Moore for other suppliers, resulting in a customer churn rate of 30% versus the industry average of 25%. She suspects that these issues could be partly due to the fact that Moore offers fewer SKUs than some of its competitors and also that some of its competitors charge lower prices than it does.

Moore's recently implemented ERP system has issues with the ease of use and poor fit with some of its processes. The most serious concern is a lack of a proactive demand forecasting system to manage the company's four distribution centers and 600 suppliers. With the existing ERP system, the percentage of "perfect orders" (orders that have all items in stock, shipped on time, and are damage free) is showing no improvement above the rate of 68% of all orders over the past 9 months. In other words, 32% of the orders remain "split orders" (orders that are not complete in some aspects). These orders are expensive for Moore because the company incurs the shipping cost multiple times for different portions of the order, although it cannot charge customers more than once.

The proposed CRM system can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Moore's sales representatives as they deal with customers. It can help the representatives with cross-selling (sales of related products) and up-selling (sales of more expensive products). The proposed ERP module is likely to be more responsive to demands and, hence, is expected to reduce the number of split orders significantly. (Adapted from an HBS case.)

1. Who are the stakeholders that would be affected? How do you handle the change management aspect of it?