This meant that the sales staff would spend time on servicing customers with many time-consuming demands and a relatively small profit gain. Not knowing the costs of having products produced, the sales staff were also quite often not capable of determining the optimal price that the customer should pay for the product. The company estimated carefully that such costs contributed with 5-7 % of total fixed costs of the company. In order to improve data quality at this strategic level, the company set out trying to gather information on costs related to inventory capacity and transportation costs.