White Papers and Demos

Over the last decade, the innovative Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model has evolved to let manufacturers move beyond traditional enterprise software.It’s a game-changing approach that lets the enterprise avoid costly licenses and complex hardware and software infrastructures.

In the business world, customers are faced with an overabundance of enterprise software choices. The selection of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is a critical decision that could provide numerous benefits or be less than an optimal selection. As ERP sales professionals, it is our job to offer potential customers the expert guidance needed to ensure that the right ERP solution is determined and selected based on the client’s needs.

In response to the many highly publicized large scale food recalls that have occurred over the last few years and diminishing consumer confidence, both regulators and the industry are responding with stricter guidelines and policies to ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply. As a result of this increasing scrutiny, along with the growing complexity of the food supply chain, many food company executives are re-examining their ability to ensure the safety and quality of their products.

As a call center, business is a lot different than it used to be. Once upon a time, you only had to worry about the competition down the street. These days, you not only have to worry about them, but you have to worry about being better than businesses in the next city, in the next state and, thanks to economic globalization, you also have to worry about competition on other continents. Competition is only part of the problem. Not only are they competing against you, but they are commoditizing your products and your brand.

As your business grows, managing IT services becomes more complex and requires a new approach and new tools. A help desk was the right solution in the early days. Users would call with an issue, and technicians would attempt to fix it as quickly as possible. IT was predominately in a firefighting mode and help desk software had a fairly singular focus: tracking incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. In order for your business to scale, you must move from a world of firefighting to one of forward planning and preventative maintenance. If you're ready to shift from reactive technology support to proactive business service support, then it's time for a service desk.

To provide a more proactive mode of service delivery and support, you must avoid committing these sins with your service desk. Volume II of this five-part series explores these seven deadly sins and reveals how they can be avoided or neutralized with an integrated centralized knowledgebase.

Business process automation is a primary driver of many service desk implementations. Large or small, your business can benefit dramatically through process automation, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. While most service desk solutions offer automation of basic repetitive tasks, others take process automation to the next level through business rule designers. The right level for you will depend on the complexity of your business. Volume III of this five-part series explores the essential process automation capabilities that every service desk solution should provide, and how they can be leveraged to streamline your business

Customer self-service is far from new. In fact, industry analyst firm Gartner projects that by 2010 self-service will account for 58 percent of all service interactions, up from 35 percent in 2005. Yet many companies are still grappling with how to get self-service right. Volume IV of this five-part series reveals six simple steps you can take to help ensure customer adoption of self-service processes, reducing their need to interface with live agents and enabling you to focus service desk resources on more strategic, complex issues.

For years, the mantra for SFA and CRM Systems has been to achieve a 360° view of the customer. The sad truth, however, is that traditional standalone Sales Force Automation solutions are not able to deliver this complete view for the sales force and leave major "blind spots" on key customer activity with the company.

In the years leading to 2000, many manufacturers realized it was necessary to prepare for a potentially disruptive transition in the IT functions when the turn of the century arrived. With thoughts of internal systems not functioning properly - or even stopping the manufacturing processes altogether - action was required.