They must gather information from sometimes multiple data sources to communicate to the customer, who many times is in person or on the phone. They must gather information from the customer and update the appropriate systems with it. How quickly they respond to the customer and answer the customer's question directly affects the customer's satisfaction with the company. Traditionally, customer service and support areas need multiple pieces of client software installed on their systems to be able to access product, customer, and company information. By putting web front-ends on these legacy pieces of software, it eliminates the need to install, manage, and support specialized client software.
Every department has budgets and financial reports.
Gathering the information from the departments and distributing the financial results can be a very labor intensive, paper based, process. Production schedules - this assures everyone has access to the most current scheduling information. Bills of material - this assures everyone has access to the most current bills of material used for producing products. This puts the responsibility of creating and maintaining web content in the hands of the actual business owners, instead of the IT department. Link Validation - automatically checks links in web pages to assure they are valid.