Oracle Updates CRM Suite

Adds proposal-generation and -management application, upgrades other apps in Sales solution

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Redwood Shores, CA — May 22, 2003 — Enterprise software company Oracle this week rolled out the latest version of its customer relationship management (CRM) suite, adding a proposal-generation and management application, along with upgrades to other apps in the suite.

New to Oracle Sales is Oracle Proposals, an application that the solution provider said would let sales professionals generate customer-ready personalized proposals from templates, automating the proposal-creation process and giving reps more time to focus on sales as opposed to sales administration activities.

Users can select from a list of pre-defined, pre-approved proposal templates that can be customized and reused. Proposals can be generated in a variety of formats, and electronically sent to customers, or printed out and mailed or faxed, depending on customer preference. The Proposals application also tracks what proposals are sent to what customers, allowing reps to monitor not only their interactions with their prospects, but also the effectiveness of various proposal formats.

In addition to adding the Proposals application, Oracle said it has upgraded other apps in the Sales suite. Improvements to Oracle Quoting include easier creation and management of customer sales and service quotes, according to the solution provider. A new user interface enables sales reps to create and update quote lines within a single screen, allowing them to display the information that is most important and useful to them. And tighter integration with Oracle Order Management allows sales reps to use external information to check the creditworthiness of their customers during the quoting process, a feature intended to reduce the likelihood of having to rework quotes.

Oracle Field Sales includes new functionality designed to let sales professionals register their prospects for marketing events directly from the sales system. It also delivers new sales opportunity reports intended to provide better visibility into opportunities. With the latest version of Oracle Incentive Compensation, sales reps can personalize their commission plan structure to be paid on a per-transaction or an aggregate transaction basis. Additionally, reps can personalize their compensation reports to give them quicker and easier access to the information they need. The goal is to have reps spend less time checking their compensation and more time interacting with customers.

Oracle Sales Offline offers new functionality designed to help reps while working away from the office be more effective by providing access to information and processes previously only available when connected to the Internet, such as creating quotes, managing day-to-day tasks and creating detailed, customized customer information.

And in an effort to streamline call center activities, Oracle has upgraded its TeleSales application to allow call center professionals to update their daily activities directly in their "universal work queue," a single dashboard that tracks all their outstanding tasks. Additionally, telesales reps are now also able to handle multiple customer interactions at once, track information about customer interactions and make mass identical changes to many records at once rather than updating records individually. Tighter integration with Oracle Order Management allows users to enter new orders directly from the TeleSales application, eliminating the need for reps to toggle between multiple screens.

The upgraded version of Oracle Sales is available now.

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