Reports - Consolidate, Innovate, Validate
Oracle CRM On Demand comes with
"CRM On Demand Answers" as its analytical tool, which the users can use to get
deeper and valuable insights into their data. It's easy to use and deploy with
prebuilt reports that managers can use.
Using this analytic tool, a manager
can slice and dice their data, see data in different contexts to make better
decisions. However, like with any analytical tool, report explosion could cause
its own problems. Administrators tend to create multiple reports of similar
nature instead of one report with flexibility built in to see the same data in
multiple contexts. This is where report consolidation needs to happen and
business users as well as administrators need to work together to achieve this.
Another way of utilizing reports is
to pass on information to other user groups in a clean format. Nobody likes to
see a printout with tables and charts everywhere. Use of reports as forms to
pass on information for e.g. creating quotes or orders document is one of the
innovative use of reports that administrators can make use of.
In order to derive benefits from
the above two points i.e. consolidating and innovating the use of reports, one
needs to have a structured validation process in place. Whenever a new report
is created questions such as the following must be asked:
Can we can use existing prebuilt
out of the box reports with built in industry best practices or can we make an
existing custom report more flexible to get the additional required context? At
an organizational level, who will create the reports? - Is it just the
administrator or also the business users to get better translation of
requirements into a report?
A good validation process, if in
place, will seek answers to all the above questions and more, before a new
report is created. However, most of the time this process is missing.
To understand more on how we can
consolidate, innovate and validate our reports, I will be speaking at an
educational session titled "Driving Business Insight with Report Optimization
in Oracle CRM On Demand" at Oracle Open World 2014. I would like to take this
opportunity to invite you to attend my session to discuss in detail on these
ideas and more. Date, time and venue details are mentioned at the bottom. Hope
to see you there!
Date - October 1st 2014
Time - 11:30 AM to 12:15 PM
