The book reveals the overall importance of a customer relationship
management system especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. In
addition to the topic of CRM, the increasing importance and
possibilities of open source software is revealed. The main research
question consists of the idea if open source customer relationship
management systems are able to fulfill the requirements of a CRM
software. In order to be able to answer this question, the following
analysis made use of the literature available on the topics CRM, special
requirements of small and medium-sized enterprises, and the topic of
open source software. By revealing what a CRM have to fulfill in order
to be classified as customer relationship management system according to
the findings in the literature, various requirements are identified. In
the next step, the three most popular open source CRM software systems
Sugar CRM, vTiger, and OpenCRX are scrutinized under the criteria if
they are able to fulfill the requirements defined in the previous steps.
The conclusion discusses the previous findings and outlines the chances
and limits of open source customer relationship management solutions for
small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition to this, the
requirements of a successful implementation of a CRM system are revealed
and the concept of seeing CRM as a corporate strategy is concretized.
The aim of this book is to outline the holistic approach of CRM and to
examine the research question if open source CRM solutions are able to
fulfill the requirements previously defined according to the underlying
literature.
