So your CRM (customer relationship management) implementation is finally finished, your direct sales team is happy, and your managers have an accurate consumer sales forecast in hand. But unless you've implemented similar tools to manage your indirect sales channels such as resellers, distributors, retailers, and other partners, you've neglected a huge portion of your relationship management needs. After all, a lot of your goods enter the marketplace via these indirect sales paths, making it critical to cultivate partner programs as assiduously as you do customer operations.
Business decision-makers analyzing risk frequently work with spreadsheet models of business situations. However, the need to manually enter multiple variables quickly consumes too much time to make it practical to test a wide range of variables. Using a smaller set of variables results in decisions that are based on the review of a very small portion of the data model's possible outcomes -- sometimes just the best or worst case scenarios.
Whether today's business executives find themselves behind or before the corporate firewall, they demand real-time access to corporate decision-support applications, such as online analytical processing (OLAP) tools.
Project managers often face the difficulty of distributing up-to-the-minute project information to teams consisting of geographically dispersed individuals working on different computing platforms. Traditional project management software can't handle this problem because each user requires a proprietary client.
The solution lies in the Web, and in using a browser as a client.