Vistaar Technologies Inc., a provider of price-management software, has made available version 1.5 of its Distribution Price Management application for alcoholic-beverage companies.
International Asset Systems has released a new set of business-intelligence modules that were designed to improve the ability of users to view and analyze the "big data" generated by everyday equipment repair and dispatch operations.
Is the term "demand responsiveness" a true call to action on the part of manufacturers, or is it just another buzz phrase? Rakesh Sharma, president and founder of Zyom Inc., believes it can have real value. He defines the term as an approach whereby companies with physical products work closely with an "ecosystem" of partners on the sales side, communicating through multi-tiered channels. Finding out in a timely fashion what has changed in those channels is no simple task anymore, given the expanding network of partners in outsourced relationships.
What is this thing called "cloud computing"? It's nothing new - that much is certain. Software vendors have been offering applications "hosted" off-site for years. The idea of computer services as a kind of managed utility dates back to the 1960s at least. Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, based its entire business model on the cloud, even if it didn't use the word at the time. Since then, we've seen a variety of takes on what came to be known as Software as a Service, or SaaS. That's now been supplanted by "the cloud," a term which refers to any number of apps that reside in huge banks of servers located far from the client.
At the end of any quarter, the last thing CFOs want to hear is that more than half of forecasted sales did not close. Unfortunately, this scenario is quite common. CFOs blame sales staffs for faulty forecasts, while sales teams try to shift the blame to IT for not giving them the right tools to turn fuzzy forecasts into actionable data.
A mere 19 percent of users are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their current solution for sales force automation (SFA) analytics and more than four-fifths must augment the built-in analytic capabilities with additional tools to address their analytic needs, according to a survey conducted for Birst Inc., provider of business analytics.
Gas and electric utilities may have a number of unique operating characteristics, but they share with other industries the need to emphasize customer service, operate safely, create a reliable supply chain and reward shareholders. PG&E's pursuit of those goals led it to integrate formal sales and operations planning (S&OP) into the organization.