CRM - May 2008 - (Page I-4)

4 May 2008 Sponsored Content construction group, executives—could access to see the status of each project, from discovery and ground-breaking to leasing and final sale. They quickly discovered that the Salesforce embedded reporting capabilities were insufficient to meet upper management needs. “We track extremely time-critical information,” said Angie Reese, database administrator at Cypress Equities. “Missing a date or deadline could cost us thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the reporting piece, we brought in Business Objects Crystal Reports® to replace the existing Excel spreadsheets, and we implemented crystalreports.com to share the reports online.” With crystalreports.com for salesforce .com, the seamless integration and ease of use delivered the business intelligence each stakeholder needed. “Every one of our projects has benefited from crystalreports.com,” asserted Reese. “It enables me to pull all these critical dates and display them, so nobody misses anything. Our staff can review the reports every day. They can see the status of each project at a glance. This is mission-critical for our company.” BEST PRACTICE: ENSURE PROVEN COMPATIBILITY WITH YOUR EXISTING CRM SYSTEM, ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS, AND DATA SOURCES. BEST PRACTICE: EVALUATE YOUR NEEDS FOR SCALABILITY, FLEXIBLE PRICING, AND PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY. If the utmost in flexibility and scalability – up or down – is desired, then the attractiveness of an on-demand BI option becomes even greater. One key advantage of on demand solutions is that they can be adopted in an incremental fashion. This permits companies to test SaaS solutions in pilot situations, or add new users or application modules on an ‘as needed’ basis. An on-demand application should be able to accommodate an increasing number of users to grow with a company’s needs and offer flexible monthly subscription pricing to fit your budget requirements. Because companies continuously rely on their BI solutions to make both strategic and tactical decisions, the on-demand service must be available 24x7. Carefully review the SaaS vendor’s uptime performance records, service delivery infrastructure capabilities, hosting company relationships, and service level agreements (SLAs). BEST PRACTICE: ENSURE STATE OF THE ART SECURITY PROTOCOLS ARE IN EFFECT. To fully leverage your CRM data, ensure that any BI solutions you implement will work seamlessly and efficiently with your existing CRM systems. Whether you have on-demand CRM from salesforce.com or on premise solutions such as Siebel, Microsoft, PeopleSoft, or SAP, make sure that the BI solutions have proven, effective integration that will result in a smooth, painfree deployment and fast time to results. Also investigate the BI vendor’s ability to work with a wide variety of data sources. Although many companies initially run reports against individual systems like salesforce.com, it’s likely that, over time, your organization will deploy BI against additional systems and databases or that you will need to access data from several sources to see the total picture. By ensuring that your BI vendor can report from large or disparate data sets, you can also avoid the painstaking and time-consuming process of manually combining data. Given the sensitive nature of the data and analysis captured by a business intelligence application, it is critical that companies carefully examine the security measures that the solution vendors have adopted to protect their proprietary information, particularly if you are deploying an on demand solution. Encryption and other technical safeguards should be in place, as well as SAS 70 Type II certification to assure that the vendor has the proper policies and procedures to protect its customers’ valuable data. Within the tool, you should also be able to specify permissions and user profiles to ensure that users receive only the reports relevant to their needs. BEST PRACTICES: DELIVER THE POWER OF INDUSTRY-LEADING BI TOOLS INTEGRATED WITH YOUR CRM SYSTEM your CRM system, and investigate whether it delivers all the capabilities and information your organization needs. Research the functionality that market-leading BI vendors can provide, such as the ability to integrate with any data source of any size; advanced reporting and dashboards across multiple systems, such as CRM and ERP or invoicing databases; and sophisticated ad hoc analysis and “what-if ” dashboards. These capabilities provide organizations with a complete view of their business, helping to ensure improved decision-making, and are simply not possible with ‘off-the-shelf ’ CRM analytics. Market leading on-demand BI solutions deliver all of the above, but at a lower cost and without the need to increase the burden on IT. Business Intelligence combined with CRM helps deliver complete insight into your business, enabling knowledge workers at all levels of your organization to make faster, more informed decisions. It allows you to combine marketing data, leads, opportunity data, and now even external market data, into a single, comprehensive report or analytic. Decision makers will be able to see the complete picture of business performance, often in real time, and make decisions that will truly impact competitive advantage. ABOUT BUSINESS OBJECTS As an independent business unit within SAP, Business Objects transforms the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses. Business Objects is the clear leader in on demand business intelligence with its full suite of SaaS offerings: crystalreports.com, crystalreports.com for salesforce.com, Business Intelligence OnDemand and Information OnDemand. To learn more and experience free trials, visit www.ondemand.com or www.crystalreports.com. 1 Kurt Schlegel, Gartner research director, Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2007, Chicago, IL. To truly maximize your CRM investments and make the most of your valuable data, familiarize yourself with the reporting/BI functionality that may be embedded within http://crystalreports.com http://crystalreports.com http://salesforce.com http://crystalreports.com http://www.ondemand.com http://www.crystalreports.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - May 2008

CRM - May 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Is CRM Too Hard for Microsoft Vendors Go Virtual For Feedback Sense-sational Marketing How UGC Can Benefit CRM DestinationCRM Dashboard Price Check, Aisle 5 Required Reading The Moving Target The Excellence Myth Seven Steps to SOA Success And They're Off! Are You Ready to Party? Skin in the Game The Right Numbers Secret of My Success Re: Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - May 2008

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