MIS 9

CRM software vendors are enhancing their products to take advantage of network technologies. These networks help firms identify new ideas more rapidly, improve team productivity, and deepen interactions with customers. Which of the following best describes social CRM?

Social CRM consists of tools enabling a business to link customer conversations, data, and relationships from social networking sites to CRM processes.

Companies with effective customer relationship management systems realize many benefits, including increased customer satisfaction, reduced direct-marketing costs, more effective marketing, and lower costs for customer acquisition and retention. What is churn rate?

The churn rate measures the number of customers who stop using or purchasing products or services from a company.

Companies that produce complex products and services, purchase resources and raw materials from hundreds of suppliers, and each of those suppliers will have its own set of suppliers. These companies need to coordinate the activities of hundreds or even thousands of other firms to produce their products and services. A supply chain is ________.

a network of organizations and business processes for procuring raw materials, transforming these materials into intermediate and finished products, and distributing the finished products to customers.

Partner relationship management is a comprehensive CRM package that will __________.

best assist a company in enhancing its collaboration with distributors and retailers

SAP, the leading vendor of enterprise systems, created a machine learning and neural network application that recognizes patterns associated with machine performance in the oil and gas industry. The software automatically generates notifications of potential machine failures and sends them to SAP Plant Maintenance, which planners use to schedule machine repair and replacement. The ________ added by SAP help managers obtain more meaningful information from the massive amounts of data generated by enterprise systems.

business intelligence tools

Coca-Cola implemented a SAP enterprise system to standardize and coordinate important business processes in 200 countries. Lack of standard, company wide business processes had prevented the company from using its worldwide buying power to obtain lower prices for raw materials and from reacting rapidly to market changes. If companies want to reap the maximum value from an enterprise software, they must change the way they work to ________.

conform to the business processes defined by the software

Manufacturers may keep too many parts in inventory because they do not know exactly when they will receive their next shipments from their suppliers. Suppliers may order too few raw materials because they do not have precise information on demand. These supply chain inefficiencies waste as much as 25 percent of a company's operating costs. If a manufacturer had perfect information about exactly how many units of product customers wanted, when they wanted them, and when they could be produced, it would be possible to implement a highly efficient ________ strategy.

just-in-time

Procter & Gamble (P&G) found it had excessively high inventories of its Pampers disposable diapers at various points along its supply chain because of such distorted information. Although customer purchases in stores were fairly stable, orders from distributors spiked when P&G offered aggressive price promotions. The diapers and their components accumulated in warehouses along the supply chain to meet demand that did not actually exist. The magnitude of a bullwhip effect is a function of the ________.

number of suppliers in a supply chain

For businesses that sell different product lines, manufactured in separate factories all over the world, decision making is improved when information from across all areas in the business can be shared, instantaneously. Which of the following statements best completes the following sentence? Enterprise systems ________.

provide value by increasing operational efficiency

The Internet and Internet technology make it possible to move from sequential supply chains, where information and materials flow sequentially from company to company, to concurrent supply chains, where information flows in many directions simultaneously among members of a supply chain network. In a(n) __________ model, actual customer orders or purchases trigger events in the supply chain. Transactions produce and deliver only what customers have ordered and move up the supply chain from retailers to distributors to manufacturers and eventually to suppliers.

pull-based

In addition to reducing costs, supply chain management systems facilitate efficient customer response, enabling the workings of the business to be driven more by customer demand. In a(n) __________ model, production master schedules are based on forecasts for best guesses of demand for products, and products are pushed to customers.

push-based

Too many, it seems as if large department stores, like Macy's, is always promoting a clearance sale. Department stores often sell, at a reduced price, the extra products in their retail centers. Department stores that consistently over estimate demand, and then sell the extra inventory at reduced prices follow a ________ model.

push-based

SAP, Salesforce.com, and Oracle CRM products now feature technology to monitor, track, and link activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites to customer relationship management processes. Tools enabling a business to link customer conversations, data, and relationships from social networking sites to CRM processes are called __________.

social CRM

Sales managers, marketers and manufacturing managers are typically part of a team that create a forecasting model for sales. The team analyzes historical data on sales, market research and surveys, actual sales of a product or competing products: They use this information to create and revise sales forecasts. __________ determines how much product a business needs to satisfy all of its customers' demand.

Demand planning

Commercial CRM software packages range from niche tools that perform limited functions, such as personalizing websites for specific customers, to large-scale enterprise applications that capture myriad interactions with customers, analyze them with sophisticated reporting tools, and link to other major enterprise applications, such as supply chain management and enterprise systems. The more comprehensive CRM packages contain modules for partner relationship management (PRM) and employee relationship management (ERM). __________ deals with employee issues that are closely related to CRM, such as setting objectives, employee performance management, performance-based compensation, and employee training.

Employee relationship management

Promises of dramatic reductions in inventory costs, order-to-delivery time, more efficient customer response, and higher product and customer profitability make enterprise systems and systems for SCM and CRM very alluring. But to obtain this value, you must clearly understand how your business has to change to use these systems effectively. What is the easiest challenge to overcome when a company implements an enterprise application?

Enterprise applications involve complex pieces of software that are very expensive to purchase and implement.

Kmart had trouble getting products to store shelves when it first implemented i2 Technologies supply chain management software. The i2 software did not work well with Kmart's promotion-driven business model, which created sharp downward spikes in demand for products. The scenario illustrates which of the following?

Enterprise applications require not only deep-seated technological changes but also fundamental changes to the way the business operates.