Enterprise Relationship Management

Enterprise relationship management or ERM is a business method in relationship management beyond customer relationship management. Enterprise Relationship Management is basically a business strategy for value creation that is not based on cost containment, but rather on the leveraging of network-enabled processes and activities to transform the relationships between the organization and all its internal and external constituencies in order to maximize current and future opportunities."

The art of relationship management is not an entirely new one. In fact, it has taken on many forms, addressing specific organizational constituencies (customers, channel partners, specialized service providers, employees, suppliers, etc). The most obvious being CRM (customer relationship management) that focuses on improving top-line growth by maximizing an organization's ability to identify sales and business opportunities with its customers. CRM's little brother PRM (partner relationship management), focuses on optimizing opportunity and downstream order management for an organization's channel partners (e.g. CISCO and its partner lead and referral management process) On the back end, we have ERP (enterprise resource planning) to manage internal operations including manufacturing, finance, HR, sales and distribution, etc. Specialized HRM (human resource management) solutions exist to manage employee benefits, collective agreements, performance reviews and so forth. And lastly, SCM (supply chain management, either as an ERP module or as a stand-alone application) to manage the product flow up and down a firm's value chain, with external partners/suppliers.