The customer has always been important. Peter Drucker, the dean of management consultants, once remarked: "Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results: all the rest are costs." (Gemmy Allen, 1999). If possible, the advent of the Internet has put even more emphasis on the importance of the customer than Drucker suggested. Historically, individual customers were limited to buying at stores near where they lived, or from catalogs or by phone. The Internet has made Web shopping possible, and it is increasingly popular with a growing number of customers. Today's customers can use software to examine prices and features of products from around the world and then order what best meets their specific needs. Interestingly, some technology experts and academic scholars have observed that there is no direct correlation between IT investments and business performance or knowledge management. For instance, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT Sloan School, notes that: "The same dollar spent on the same system may give a competitive advantage to one company but only expensive paperweights to another." Hence a key factor for the higher return on the IT dollar is the effective utilization of technology. In the good old days selling a product to customers was enough to ensure success - if it was a good product. However, while that is generally still true, it is no longer enough. There are dozens of similar good products competing for markets that have worldwide scope and localized distribution needs. With the accession of the Internet to the mainstream, small and large companies compete to do business in the same marketplaces. It is no coincidence that customer retention has become one of the primary focuses of contemporary sales and marketing. This gives rise to Sales Force Automation, designed to help sales people acquire and retain customers, reduce administrative time and to make salesperson's activities something that earns them and their company's money.
[...] In sales-side (front end) process automation what modules are to be considered? A. Sales Force Automation D. Network Management B. Inventory Management E. Order Management C. Relationship Management F. Knowledge Management 11. Rate how following factors helps IT to assure administration efficiency? LOW ( ( MOODERATE ( ( HIGH A. Establishing IT infrastructure B. Empowering staff C. Empowering functional units D. Fast and instant Information flow E. Creating and managing website F. Planning, Administration & Operations G. Main objective of paperless office H. [...]
[...] Sales-side Process Automation (Front End) is emerging as a solution to the changing scenario due to fast change in technology and increasing competition OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT OBJECTIVE: To explore the scope of Sales-side Process Automation for the improvement of overall efficiency of marketing SUB OBJECTIVE: To study the present market scenario. To identify key success factors with respect to Relationships, Network, Knowledge and Technology for Core Competency. Chapter- CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND LITERATURE SURVEY In this project an overview of the opportunities, technologies, and problems associated with the analysis and improvement of customer-facing processes is being discussed. [...]
[...] In addition, different processes are more or less similar in all these three sectors so a generalized study was possible to conduct and also to study various issues important for these industries for process automation and integration RESEARCH DESIGN: A research design is a framework or blueprint for conducting the research project. It details the procedure necessary for obtaining the information needed to structure or solve research problems. The problem domain is the phenomena of the recent past at the advent of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and global competition, which is not duly supported by sufficient empirical research especially for physical product industrial sectors. [...]
[...] From the response of the industry experts and from the literature survey we can that the different cubs listed above of a suggested Sales-side Process Automation System should have following features: Collaboration Features The following features are intended to promote teamwork and better planning or resources within company: Group Calendar Appointment Invitation and Response Tracking Automatic Notifications of Appointment Responses Task Management Automatic Notification of Task Acceptance, Decline, Missed Deadlines Integrated of Account Database User-Defined Activity Types Contact/Account Management Features Key features of the contact and account database: Unlimited User-Defined Fields (All Indexed and Searchable) Per Account Unlimited Contacts Per Account (All Indexed and Searchable) Tracking of Activities Per Contact and Per Account Unlimited Phone/Fax Numbers Per Account (All Indexed and Searchable) Unlimited Email/Web Address Per Account (All Indexed and Searchable) Unlimited Email Address Per Contact Unlimited Phone/Fax Numbers Per Contact Search on Every Field of an Account Integrated Web Links Full Text Searching of Account Notes Visual Query Processor for Complex Account Queries Rules-Based Assignment of Accounts to Salespeople Sound-Alike Searching for Names Marketing, Sales and Service All Linked to Common Account Record User Defined Account Profiles Communication Features These features promote better communication with customers and prospects. [...]
[...] Regardless of how contentious or adversarial this process becomes, an underlying layer of consensus decision making is always required to deal with the choice of language, level of vocabulary, information technology tools, database or ontology. The term knowledge base is often used to describe these foundations. Maintenance of the knowledge base is an additional characteristic of this discipline (http://www.encyclopedia4u.com). KM is often described as being in step with other organizational initiatives and systems such as Quality Management and Business Process Reengineering. [...]
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