Dedicated analytics or default CRM reporting?

CRM/ERP is like a heart of every business. It supplies all departments with information and takes care of the items integrity. Cloud technologies and Web 2.0 boom contributed to transformation of CRM desktop systems into a mobile and dynamic services. It works all around the operations departments well but it lacks KPI driven business strategy. It is because the nature of information-management systems does not allow to apply KPI-driven philosophy. You can meet examples in SalesForce, Sage CRM or MS Dynamics:

• Unable to combine data from departments which do not use CRM
• Poor cross-object indicators, pivot and aggregation
• Presenting shareable data (no e-mails needed)

The difference between BI and CRM reporting

Usually, the CRM indicators compute outputs from particular fields. If the field does not provide history data, your reports are limited to current time. You cannot browse or compare history on the KPIs level.

Producers of CRM software enable history only for a fraction of fields to avoid storage and computing overload or introduce extra objects are (ex.: Account History in SalesForce) to track changes. Despite that, integrated CRM reporting will never provide a satisfactory interface to work with KPI-driven history, as it focuses on individual account stories or campaign.

The business view is about browsing aggregated trends in a time range not about entry stories. The following table shows the process of simplification and transformation of entry-oriented warehouse into the KPI-driven business environment:

The users of business intelligence differ from the common object-targeted CRM users as illustrated in the table. It is the fight between exact processes and pie charts with a clear message. The good BI provides the second one.

The main advatange of dedicated BI is relieving business user from data model complexicity (SalesForce CRM dashboard versus BellaDati dashboard).

Implementation: The snapshotting technique

We have been working on several more CRM connectors for BellaDati lately and in all cases we ended up with the snapshotting technique. The receipe is simple: create snapshots of a CRM database every day, let warehouse to aggregate the values and get real indicators on output. Modern BI systems as BellaDati have connectors with automated and schedulable importing process so the basic integration is a matter of minutes.

Cheaper solution, less limits

The most important fact is that dedicated business intelligence service decreases the costs. Count expenses for a Business Objects integration (including infrastructure boost) and compare with a cloud service with SAP connector on the other hand. Imagine amount of man-hours of a SalesForce consultants required for customizing your reports (which will probably does not attract your management). Let analytic teams design dashboards and reports on their own without hacking limitations of integrated reporting.