Abstract
Recently, enterprises have faced the pressure of industry transformation and high competency in the global market. In Taiwan, most small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford advanced R&D. In order to increase competency of SMEs, the technology and service providers (TSPs) play a critical role for innovative technology provision. Traditionally, the salesmen of TSPs have to evaluate the critical customers via trials and errors. In addition, although the personal digital assistant (PDA) has been widely used to promote business for its high mobility, the business information downloaded into PDA is actually rarely concerned. In order to increase efficiency and effectiveness of business promotion, this paper focuses on the development of a personal business information management (PBIM) model with four modules namely critical customer identification (CCI), potential customer identification (PCI), PDA user category determination (UCD) and PDA user busy level determination (UBD) for TSPs to identify potential customers and to provide personalized business information. A non-profit R&D institute in Taiwan is used to validate feasibility of the proposed modules via the developed PBIM platform. This paper presents a feasible PBIM approach for the TSPs to efficiently and systematically analyze the project history and PDA daily records for business outreach. © 2009 IFAC.