Humour

RoI on ERP, into your Next Life

T A Balasubramanian writes about an ERP solution that gives eternal joy and direct moksha to customers

“Give me your quotation for your best ERP support products,” says Swami Datananda, Paramaguru and CIO of Next Life Reassurance Inc, to the vendor from More Enterprise Systems and Solutions, “and, I will place the order, with a few questions asked. I will also desist from referring to your company by its abbreviated name. I understand that you encourage all your customers to refer to your company as always More, but never MESS?”

“Yes, Swami, that is right,” beams Sellina Reddy, More’s Regional Sales Manager, happy that this almost-

customer has been so quick on the uptake. Usually, she has to make several visits and many PowerPoint presentations just to get her prospective customers to say, “Enough. I’ll try More.” Usually, the typical weary almost-customer did this to get rid of Sellina quickly from the premises, but Sellina Reddy earnestly thought that it was her persuasive selling that did the trick.

“Can you tell me more about your application, Swami? At More, our goal is to get more,” says Sellina, pumping her fist up for effect. She is moving in quickly, now that her “target” seems to be turning from suspect to prospect to almost-customer pretty quickly, like they had promised her would happen in More’s training sessions. “Strike while the prospect is hot,” she recalls the military-style training manager screaming.

“Our main application at Next Life is ERP,” says Datananda, who does not seem to need much persuasion. “That is Enlightenment Resource Planning. With resources like karma, yoga and nidra, we have plans to do much more sophisticated projects for our customers. For example, we could combine karma and yoga to create karma-yoga for the active customer, or yoga and nidra to produce yoga-nidra for the laid-back customer. You get the idea? It’s all about resource planning and integration. Now we want to get the best SCM and CRM technologies added to our ERP so that we can deliver high quality enlightenment to our customers as painlessly and seamlessly as possible.”

“Oh, yes. SCM and CRM. Our product can handle all that very smoothly for any ERP you have. We have built an exclusive More Spinner Module into our solutions,” says Sellina, enthusiastically.

“Good. By SCM, we mean Spiritual Chain Management. I hope you can provide clear and easy-to-use graphical interfaces too. We like to spend less time in doing elaborate training programmes and more time on MIS,” says Datananda.

“Spiritual Chain Management?” says Reddy, scratching her head. “Oh yes, yes, we can add features to take care of that too, Swami. We can take care of anything, anything more. Who are your suppliers on this Spiritual Chain, if I may ask?”

“We have millions of them, I should guess,” says Datanand, smiling. “It comes from an endless chain of suppliers going back to the beginning of time. Brahma Corporation, Vishnu Vikas Kendra and Shiva Central are three of the main ones. The others are spread all over the universe. Which is why we are trying to get your solutions to manage this enormous Web of spiritual inputs.”

“And CRM? The usual expansion?” says Sellina, hopefully.

“Ah, coming to CRM. That is, Complete Reassurance of Moksha. It is our ultimate promise to customers. We believe in going way beyond customer satisfaction or even delight to customer next-life ananda, or joy eternal. In fact, our mission is to try and give customers direct moksha

solutions in their present life itself, so that Next Life can extend its services to new markets all the time. In most cases, however, we do have to continue services for customers into their next lives, since all of them are not yet ready to take on our premium range of Moksha Now products. For them we have our Moksha Carry-On range.”

“Oh, sure, sure,” says Sellina quickly. “Our solution can give you any kind of CRM you want in as many life cycles as your ERP needs. Even if I am not around, Next Life can tap our well-developed More support network. Anytime, anywhere, any life.”

“Beautiful,” says Datananda, beaming with yogic satisfaction and joy.

“Then, coming back to what you were saying about more time on MIS? Is that a specific need too?”

“Oh, yes. At Next Life, we insist on MIS. It is the highest form of abstraction, which helps us to directly impart all our Veda base, or knowledge to our customers.”

“What does MIS stand for?” says Sellina, now resigned to Next Life’s unique new age jargon. “Not the usual thing, I suppose?”

“Usual thing? Oh no, it stands for Meditation-Is-Simple. As we give all our customers their unique MIS mantras we back it up with the ERP, hopefully adding on your SCM and CRM modules soon. And sure enough, like in any good business model, we expect to get high RoI on all our investments.”

“RoI?” says Sellina, her eyes glazing over now.

“Removal of Illusion,” says Datananda, with a blissful smile. “When meditation is simple, we always manage to get a high rate of removal of illusion. More MIS, more RoI. Now, would you like to take our order?”