You need to identify the most important benefit derived from the Contoso sales process improvement project. What should you identify?

Question

Options

• ACost avoidance
• BCost reductions
• CRevenue generation
• DRevenue protection

• A
  9% (2)
• B
  4% (1)
• C
  83% (19)
• D
  4% (1)

Explanation

Case Study 5 - The Phone Company (QUESTION 44 - QUESTION 54) COMPANY BACKGROUND Corporate Information The Phone Company provides telecommunications services, network design, and systems integration for large businesses. EXISTING ENVIRONMENT Existing Business Processes The Phone Company is currently evaluating its business processes for the collection, updating, and matching of curriculum vitaes (CVs) in professional service sales proposals. The current business process is informal. Employees of the Sales department request information from professeional services personnel by using e-mail, telephone, and face-to-face meetings. There is no single point of contact and the system only tends to work well when the salesperson and the appropriate Professional Services Managers have a personal relationship. Existing Technology Infrastructure The company's IT department makes most of the software purchasing decisions. In some cases, the company departments also implement applications for their specific needs. The following applications are deployed: - CRMApp - A customer relationship management (CRM) system used by sales to track opportunities and opportunity requirements. - ERP App - A very strategic enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used to process sales orders and pay vendors, including professional service contractors. The application includes a module for analyst resource planning that is not deployed. The implementation of such a module is a long, expensive project and benefits are unlikely for many - XLine - A system that enables the Professional Services department to obtain contractors from approved vendors without submitting a formal request for proposal (RFP). - CPoint - A system to track professional service resources (analysts). The company's IT department does not support this software. - Microsoft Office - The Phone Company also has access to Office 2007 through an Enterprise Agreement (EA). Office 2003 is deployed on all client computers. The Phone Company has Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) for all of its Microsoft-licensed products, which include Office, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office Project Server, Microsoft Office Project Porfolio Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. All client software is deploye by using an automated deployment system. Server software is deployed manually. BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS Sales management and the IT department believe that the proper combination of SharePoint technologies and electronic forms, templates, and workflow would help improve business process Problem Statements The Phone Company identifies the following problems concerning the current business process for CV management: - Use of outdated CVs by Sales Representatives leads to incorrect resource identication and assignment. - Sales Representatives cannot identify whether CVs are up-to-date. - CVs are maintained in different formats. - CVs are not indexed or centrally stored. - Communication between the company departments is inefficient. - ERP App and CRMApp fail to provide any management capabilities for The Sales department has identified the following desirable standards for a proposed future state: - Standardized CVs - Standardized process and workflow - Fast, efficient request for CVs - - Accurate and up-to-date information Resource availability and scheduling - Integration with the enterprise applications - Integraton with contract and statement of work development. - Integration with third-party vendor resource acquisition, which is currently undertaken separately. Sales Managers are more concerned about the amount of time their Sales Representatives spend calling other employees to organize sales proposals, than the amount of time they spend on calls to customers. They believe that an automated solution would cut the duration of the sales proposal process by 75 percent. For each proposal, a representative typically spends between one to two weeks gathering CVs from the Professional Services department. This includes eight to 10 hours communicating within the company and two to three hours of preparing a CV package for a customer. The IT Planners are concerned about strategic alignment and the need to maximize use of software already purchased to minimize development costs. Professional Services Manager. The Professional Services Manager tracks all professional services and manages all analysts, including scheduling anaysts for new work. The Professional Services Manager favors the current process, which facilitates organizational control. The Professional Services Manager has the following goals: - Ensure that the Sales department only submits CVs that have been approved by the Professional Services department. - Increase use of analysts by the Professional Services department. Analysts perform consulting work for The Phone Company customers and have limited insight into the sales proposal process, generally communicating only with their Professional Services Manager. Analysts report that the Human Resources department sometimes fails to define job titles used in CVs according to industry-standard terms. Sales Representative Sales Representatives support the current informal CV process and have the necessary contact information for key professional service individuals. The representatives agree that the current process has a high learning curve and must be standardized to account for vacations and employee attrition.

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