Tag Archives: sfa
How Integration Platform-as-a-Service Impacts Cloud Adoption
Did you know that Forrester estimates in their 10 Cloud Predictions For 2012 blog post that on average organizations will be running more than 10 different cloud applications and that the public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will hit $33 billion by the end of 2012?
However, in the same post, Forrester also acknowledged that SaaS adoption is led mainly by Customer Relationship Management (CRM), procurement, collaboration, and Human Capital Management (HCM) software and that all other software segments will “still have significantly lower SaaS adoption rates”. It’s not hard to see this in the market today, with cloud juggernaut salesforce.com leading the way in CRM, and Workday and SuccessFactors doing battle in HCM, for example. Forrester claims that amongst the lesser known software segments, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Business Intelligence (BI), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) will be the categories to break through as far as SaaS adoption is concerned, with approximately 25% of companies using these solutions by 2012. (more…)
The Power And Flexibility Of Universal MDM
Let’s say you’re a Fortune 500 manufacturer and a supplier informs you that a part it sold you last year is faulty and needs to be replaced. What’s the first thing you do—and how do you do it?
You need answers fast to critical questions: In which products did we use the faulty part? Which customers bought those products and where are they located? Do we have substitute parts in stock? Do we have an alternate supplier? (more…)
Why CIOs Need to Take Control Of Customer Data With MDM
CIOs are no longer expected to be mere IT housekeepers who keep the lights on in the data center. More and more, they’re expected to help drive business innovation and transformation, function as strategic partners with the business and materially contribute to bottom-line performance.
One critical area in which CIOs can make a major business impact is customer data integration. As we often hear from Informatica customers, the problem of bad customer data is rarely limited to a single application or line of business. In fact, it’s a multitude of systems that has caused the problem in the first place.
Putting Master Data In The Hands Of Business Users
As companies increasingly explore master data management (MDM), we often hear inquiries about the usability of master data by business users.
Common questions include: Do business users need to learn and use a separate MDM application? Do they need support from IT to access master data? Can master data fit into the everyday business applications they use for CRM, SFA, ERP, supply chain management, and so forth?
If your organization has ever asked these questions, you should take a look at our new white paper, “Drive Business User Adoption of Master Data.” (more…)
MDM In Action: A New Demo On Customer Account & Channel Partner Management
One of the hottest areas of master data management (MDM) is using high quality master data to drive revenue by supporting sales and channel operations. Informatica customers have racked up some terrific successes using MDM to generate a single, reliable view of customer and account information—and here’s a key reason why.
Acquire & Retain Customers with Trusted & Complete Customer Data
With Informatica MDM and Informatica Data Quality, sales and channel personnel gain hands-on control of customer data, product data and channel partner data and the relationships between this data. Those customer-facing teams no longer need to spend most of their time hunting for information in the CRM system, SFA system, billing system, partner management and other systems and reconciling it in spreadsheets. And they don’t need to wait on IT to round up and deliver the data they need right away.
If you’re wondering how this works, check out our six-minute how-to demo on MDM for customer account and channel partner management. This new demo offers a practical, step-by-step walk-through of how a sales, marketing and channel operations personnel can evolve from trying to sort through the clutter of contradictory data from multiple systems to leveraging a single, actionable customer account data set that powers a 360-degree customer view in their CRM system so they can improve customer acquisition and retention.
Are You Shortchanging Your Customer-Facing Teams?
Are you giving your sales, marketing and service delivery teams the customer-centric views they need to excel?
Sure, you’ve rolled out sales force automation (SFA), customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and other applications to support your their processes across your lines of business and regions… but that’s actually part of the problem. Those disparate systems usually contain inconsistent data, in various formats, on B2B customer accounts and their subsidiaries, divisions, locations and contacts, their products and service agreements as well as the sales reps and channel partners that are covering these accounts.
Because the data is sprawled out, often contradictory, and not readily accessible, your customer-facing teams are forced to spend valuable time stitching together spreadsheets with information from multiple systems. At many B2B companies, it’s not uncommon for sales reps to spend 70 percent of their time searching for and reconciling data—and just 30 percent on customer engagement. (more…)