Business Driven Technology 6th Edition by Paige Baltzan

Exercise 26

Sales Pipeline
Sales drive any organization. This is true for every for-profit business irrespective of size or industry type. If customers are not buying your goods or services, you run the risk of not having a business. This is when tough decisions have to be made like whether to slash budgets, lay off staff, or seek additional financing.
Unfortunately, you do not wield ultimate power over your customers' buying habits. While you can attempt to influence buying behavior through strategic marketing, smart businesses remain one step ahead by collecting and analyzing historical and current customer information from a range of internal and external sources to forecast future sales. In other words, managing the sales pipeline is an essential ingredient to business success.
You have recently been hired by RealTime Solutions, a new company that collects information to understand, manage, and predict specific sales cycle (including the supply chain and lead times) in the automobile business. Having an accurate forecast of future sales will allow the company to increase or decrease the production cycle as required and manage personnel levels, inventory, and cash flow.
Project Focus
Using a personal DBMS package (preferably Microsoft Access) create a sales pipeline database that will:
1. Track opportunities from employees to customers.
Opportunities should have a ranking, category, source of opportunity, open date, closed date, description.
2. Create a form for inputting customer, employee, and opportunity data.
3. Create a few reports that display:
All open opportunities, including relevant customer and employee information.
Closed opportunities, including relevant customer and employee information.
All customers.
4. Create your own data to test the integrity of the relationships. Use approximately 10records per table