Among SEAT Pagine Gialle's key assets are its information databases and highly sophisticated systems infrastructure, which support the entire business cycle.
 
The company's databases and range of applications and technologies are structured to handle some impressive figures:

• around 800,000 contracts/year
• 3.2 million businesses
• 14 million private subscribers
• 3.5 million business subscribers
• 2,400 basic category attributes
• 57,000 keywords
• 1,900,000 ads per year
• 1,400 sales agents
  

Core Applications
 
SFE (Front End System for the sales force — which was released in January 2009 followed by a year-long roll-out plan): a custom system for enabling the sales process in line with Seat requirements through a dialogue with the transactional systems (SAP, SEM, CDB, etc.). The system is used for analysing the customer base and defining strategies, creating the proposal to be adopted during negotiations, order acquisition, variation and advance on-line validation, real-time data updating on all Company Systems, rapid transition from proposal to contract loading, preview of graphic resolution of all products directly by the production systems.

SAP: the SAP system is the Seat platform on the order to cash cycle.

• SAP M/AM back-end module allowing the order to be loaded in its administrative and commercial components and possible variations. It also supports the billing process.
• SAP CRM module for managing sales campaigns
• SAP ICM module for managing sales agents' commissions
• SAP BW module for Data Warehouse SAP used solely for the commissions module
• SAP FI module which manages the administrative and accounting processes (supplier accounting, general accounting, management control, profit and cost center accounting, asset accounting, etc.)

the system was released in January 2009 and then followed by a year-long roll-out plan.

SEM: Multimedia Editorial System which provides for integrated and flexible production of a customer's full range of advertising material, irrespective of publication media (on-paper, on-line and on-voice). It enables production control through a single planning and control dashboard that can monitor each step of the production process, provides advance assistance to the Sales Force in preparing commercial proposals for customers using content available on the multimedia archive and editorial functionalities already fully consistent with the formats and subsequent production processes, and facilitates the design of new products, reducing their implementation complexity and time to market.

DWH (Data Warehouse) is the "data store" which supports the company's decision-making system and incorporates the information of all the transactional systems, collecting the historic data concerning the elements of all the business processes. Based on industry-leading technology (Oracle), the DWH is interrogated by a Business Intelligence system (Business Objects) and used by specialised analysts to process data and perform advanced statistical analysis with cutting-edge Data Mining tools (SAS).

Climan is the post-sales system that provides advanced functionality for managing customer service and customer complaints.

CACS is the world's leading credit collections software. The system supports the new monitoring and collection processes based on analyses of customers' risk of default. By improving credit management, it allows the optimisation of working capital.

Credit Scoring: application based on statistical analysis to determine a synthetic "credit scoring" for each customer, keeping into consideration the degree of customer solvency and arrearage. The system allows to prevent sales with a potential credit risk.

Main data asset
 
Telephone Data Base (so-called Subscribers' Data Base or Universal Data Base), which contains the essential details (name or company name, address, any professional title and description of the economic activity, telephone number, e-mail address) of all subscribers to the fixed and mobile telephone services provided by all telephone operators, who have not requested that their details be kept confidential.

The value added contributed by SEAT to the previous Data Base consists in information normalisation and categorisation of business operators. In fact, the data acquired by SEAT undergoes a dual process:

1. the first is so-called "normalisation", which consists in standardising, with the aid of a SEAT proprietary applications software, information provided with different wordings about place and road name descriptions, company names and academic titles;
2. the second process concerns only business subscribers and consists in linking a product sector to a subscriber (so-called "categorisation" of business operators); through an outsourced telemarketing service, SEAT classifies economic operators according to the PAGINEGIALLE product index (this has been filed by SEAT in accordance with copyright law). This information is included in the Subscribers' Data Base in association with the data supplied by the telephone carrier.

The database described is used by SEAT, first of all, to create the PAGINEBIANCHE alphabetic telephone directory, the on-line directory that can be consulted on the PAGINEBIANCHE.it site and the directory assistance services 89.24.24 Pronto PAGINEGIALLE and 12.40 Pronto PAGINEBIANCHE, as well as, for business subscribers, PAGINEGIALLE, PAGINEGIALLE On line and other category yearbooks.

CDB: the Customer Database (CDB) is the single database for Italian economic operators (existing customers and prospects), which is the base both for the CRM and Accounting processes, and manages both the commercial and administrative view. The system is also the base for the Marketing (indicators for segmentation of Economic Operators, the Customer Table) and Campaign Management processes (it provides lists of potential customers for Sales Campaigns, Telemarketing, Directory Distribution, etc.)

Data Base Content: this is a database containing all the multimedia components relating to adverts, developed internally and made operational in 2003. Data Base Content collects, memorises and indexes all the basic and structured information on economic operators (openings, signs, trademarks, brands handled, images, keywords, addresses, telephones, URLs, e-mails) and final outputs resulting from the production of the SEAT products and services.

HW/SW infrastructure
 
In 2010 Seat PG and Engineering closed the agreement regarding the transfer of the business branch of Seat PG's Turin Data Center, with the aim of maximising the Data Processing Center asset by developing synergies with one of the sector's leading companies and achieving even greater overall efficiency and competitiveness. The agreement involved the transfer to Engineering of the offices and personnel relating to the data center, network and telephone operations, as well as computer and devices. At the same time, Seat PG and Engineering have signed a five-year IT services procurement contract.
The Machine Room, all Italian SEAT offices, the Zone Manager offices and the offices of the main Agents are all connected through redundant broadband lines for data transmission. The entire sales force is provided with a UMTS/HSUPA mobile connection with data transmission card for connection to company applications.
The company's hardware for individual use consists of approximately 2,000 laptops, 1,100 desktop workstations and 1,300 tablets for use by employees and the sales force, all of which are replaced every four years. Computers are installed with Windows 7 and Office 2007 Package.