4. How can the system improve customer service? Being in an extremely competitive business, Lexmark needs detailed, accurate, and timely information for decision support and strategy implementation. This is especially important when it comes to data flow between Lexmark and its retail partners. The most important information is detailed by item, sales volumes, and inventory levels. The old system was slow, inefficient, and error-ridden. Problems occurred both with flows from the partners and with data delivery. In delivering the data, results were often copied from spreadsheets and pasted into reports, typically taking four days or longer to produce answers to common business questions. Sales representatives out in the field had to dial into the intranet. Once a connection was established, analysts and sales representatives had to write SQL queries and navigate the mainframe to generate reports for management, some of which were based on inaccurate, week-old data.