Research On The Communication About Mould Technical Request In The CRM Of The Mould Manufacturer

With the advent of the customer-driven business philosophy, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the integration of the fast developing internet technologies and this business conception. Recently, the oversea mould-users gradually pay more attentions to the mould manufacturers in China, and this tendency makes the inland mould makers have more opportunities of obtaining the orders from the oversea, as well as have to confront larger challenges. It is very important for the mould manufacturers to get more orders from many customers and keep good relationships with them. Besides, due to the fact that the manufacturing mode of the mould is typically the engineering-to-order with resource-oriented, often one-of-a-kind, many activities in the mould life-cycle will be involved and collaborated with the customer, and the manufacturer will inevitably communicate with the customer about the detailed technical request on the mould. In order to meet such a persistent requirement on the communication with the customer, the CRM for mould makers will be the best choice.In this paper, the necessity of applying CRM in the mould manufacturer is first analyzed based on the typical business workflow of a mould maker. A new thought is put forward to integrate the CRM with the ERP, SCM, KM, PDM and MES on the basis of the information management state-of-art of a mould manufacturer to meet its future demand. The framework of the CRM and the detailed function tree is designed based on this concept. One of the major features of the CRM for the mould makers is the persistent communication between the mould makers and their customers, and it is emphasized in the design of such a subsystem of CRM. The problems, such as how to communicate with the customers before the mould design, to confirm the mould technical request quickly and exactly, to use the mould technical request to work out its structure quickly and then to quote accurately, are often occurred in the typical mould manufacturers. These problems are analyzed in detail in this paper. After that, an algorithm using the case-based reasoning is presented. It can find the mould technical request quickly to help the mould designer and the customers communicateeffectively, and use the fuzzy decision to help the mould designer select the mould structure to be used in the quotation.At last, a platform to interchange information with customers is developed based on the I-M3 (mould making management) system in the background of a large mould manufacturer. The corresponding function structure, the data interface, the system hierarchical structure, the network security are designed and investigated according to the requirements from the customer.