Having been in the business of implementing Business/CRM/ERP Systems for many years, reporting has always been the poor relation of implementation. Basically once the system is in, attention turns to reports. It is usually defined as ‘What reports do you want’, i.e. they are created reactively by the client telling us what reports they want.

Wouldn’t it be great if the client could ‘create/discover’ their own reports?

Consider Google or indeed any search engine – how successful would they be if the end user had to be prescriptive about where/what sites they wanted to search?

How often have you started looking for something on a Google search and before you know it you’ve shot off at a tangent, reading about the latest video game/holiday park, football transfer? You end up somewhere you never intended to go.

How about a reporting tool that allows you to do the same?

As a business we have recently become involved in QlikView for utilisation in Business Intelligence (BI). Although I was impressed with the product before I took it on I didn’t realise how powerful a tool it really is! The term “Business Discovery” really means something! (See our recent blog, Traditional BI versus Data Discovery)

All ERP/Business systems come with some form of reporting or the ability to utilise Crystal. So what’s different about Business Discovery? Is it really the Business Discovery element that has knocked my socks off?

I have above average skill sets in Excel and often use SQL queries to connect data to Excel and then utilise pivot table/Power Pivot to create, what I thought, were pretty snazzy reporting tools. However I have now realised how difficult they are to use, and indeed limiting. Don’t get me wrong, they are very good and give me the information I want, but I would end up with multitudes of spreadsheets and pages within spreadsheets to get the analysis I need.

Business Discovery is where the reporting tool allows you to meander through data much in the same way as we use Google – you start off somewhere but the model allows you to go places and ask questions that weren’t on the list at the start of the reporting session. Traditionally most reports are static i.e. run the aged debtors every Monday; give me the weekly sales figures etc. A Qlikview model allows you to start with the weekly sales figures, but then go on a journey:

• What happened to sales in that product area?
• Let me see the sales by geographical area?
• Why does area 1 sell more of product 1 than area 2

This is not a traditional drill down of your pivot tables but instead a platform that allows you to meander through the data without rebuilding data cubes or running reports with different parameters. With Business Discvoery it’s the immediacy of the results that matter – the user gets amazingly quick results. Imagine if Google made you wait 10 minutes to open a new browser window!

Is it as simple as loading the tool and getting on with it?

No! Qlikview provides a free, fully functioning version of their product to work in standalone environments. It has only been transparent to us after working on models for a few months and completing technical training courses that the biggest drawback is our own, historical, inbuilt mentality on reports. We have been trained to create reports that are prescriptive and reactive – Business Discovery requires a different mind-set.

After two months of working on Qlikview the penny dropped. All we had been doing was recreating what we had in Excel as pivot tables etc. – we weren’t using the real benefits of business discovery. Once we did, we saw the dramatic difference.

About the Author

Alistair Livingstone is Managing Director at Eureka Solutions and has over 16 years experience in the business software industry, focusing on ERP, CRM & BI soluions.

Following on from our recent post, Traditional BI versus Data Discovery, I came across this video featuring Donald Farmer, Product Advocate for QlikView. In the video, Farmer goes into greater detail on Data Discovery.

Anna Young – Marketing Assistant

The next generation of business users might just agree with that.

Having recently read an article that looked into the changing roles of IT professionals in 2012, I began to think that perhaps the old complexity of Business Intelligence has begun to disappear.

Gone are the days when IT had complete control over enterprise technology and budgets, the days when an employee came to IT in order to analysis sales figures or create a report on an important matter. The role of an IT professional has changed from analysing and delivering information, into support and enablement.

Business Intelligence within the workplace is no longer littered with complex words and hard to understand data. Advancements in Business Intelligence software now make it a tool that not only an IT wiz would understand. Instead business users at all ends are able to use and enjoy BI. Laptops, Android phones and tablets have meant that people are not only analysing data in the office, but anywhere at any time.

‘Data Discovery’, as it is now named by Gartner, has given control back to every user giving them an easy means to visualise and use their data in a productive manner. The in memory and associative analysis of data has meant that business users are able to answer questions and solve their business problems at the click of a button.

Business Intelligence has changed its role from an information delivery system into a vital tool in decision making. For more information on this check out our recent blog post, Tradtional Business Intelligence Processess Versus Data Discovery.

Historically, Business Intelligence (BI) has been about a report-centric architecture that’s IT-driven and highly controlled. IT departments take operational data, create data models and build reports for end users. Traditional business intelligence delivers predefined reports and queries and pre-configured dashboards.

Let’s look at what’s involved in a traditional business intelligence process. Initially, a data warehouse would be set up to consolidate data from many sources. Data warehouses are designed to run analysis on large volumes of historical data. To get the data into the data warehouse there is then an ETL – Extract, Transform and Load process that it needs to go through. The transform step can include multiple data manipulations such as splitting, translating, merging, sorting & pivoting. The final Load step involves loading the transformed data into the data warehouse.

So in traditional BI, data warehouse and ETL tools support “back end” processes. The next step is usually to use an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tool to support the presentation layer or “front end” processes such as querying, analysis and reporting. OLAP tools allow multi-dimensional data analysis & the capability to present this in a visual interface with charts, tables and graphs. Cubes are the core components of OLAP systems; they aggregate facts from the data at multiple levels.

With traditional BI, data sources are normally pre-determined by IT.  End users don’t get to interact with the data in the systems. The analysis and reporting is generally conducted by IT. The analysis and reporting  is hard-wired into the data warehouse and cube structure. Each time data changes are required, the data has to go back through the time consuming ETL process described above, which could involve analysis across networked databases and hard drives. This can be a very slow process.

Business Discovery Process

With Business Discovery Tools like QlikView, this process is very different and much faster. QlikView takes all of your data from virtually any source and consolidates it into a single data pool. Next, QlikView loads the entire data pool into memory. Users don’t have to pre-process data and organise it into cubes and there are no hard disks involved like in traditional BI. Accessing data in memory is much faster than accessing data from disk.

With QlikView users get to search and analyse all of their data in one place. As the data is in memory, there is no need to wait on data refreshing with each new data selection. Users can instantly select data they are interested in, make associations and see relationships between data residing in different applications. They can perform ad hoc queries on the data and ask ‘what if’ type questions all within the one application. Business discovery tools like QlikView are fast, intuitive and simple to use. They give users the data that they need at their fingertips.

Business Discovery is about self-service Business Intelligence. It enables business users to customize and change analysis to address their exact business problems. Business users get access to the data they need when they need it and they get it fast!

Article by Carolyn ClarkCarolyn Clark is Business Intelligence Account Manager at Eureka Solutions and specialises on QlikView Business Intelligence software. Carolyn has a degree in Management Science and has many years’ experience in the software industry focussing on business process management & business insight products. To get in touch with Carolyn, email carolyn.clark@eurekasolutions.co.uk or call 01355 581 960.

By Carolyn Clark, Account Manager, Eureka Solutions

The practice of Business Intelligence (BI) has suffered for many years from the pretence that the information needs of business users can be predicted in advance. Much of what BI delivers is predetermined. Data is extracted from many sources, consolidated into a data warehouse, and pre-computed into answers. At the end, you get a dashboard or report that shows you what you wanted. An example could be sales by region. But what invariably happens is once the data is presented, it leads to more questions.

If sales are down in the west, you need to know why. You need to see sales by rep and product, but typically, the dashboard or report can only show you what you originally asked for. If you want to ask additional questions or see new insights, you need to go back to IT and ask them to add exactly what you want to the report or dashboard.

Living Dashboards

What is needed is a dashboard with the power to ask and answer any question on the fly. In other words, if you think it, you should be able to act on it.

Unlike traditional dashboards, these new dashboards are constantly being tuned and adjusted to meet up-to-the-second needs. These living dashboards are the opposite of predetermined BI. Living dashboards can easily adapt to discovering and exploring new territory quickly and at low cost. Taken to their full potential, they can help find root causes, identify leading indicators, and then share them throughout the organisation.

As its name implies, a living dashboard is a living thing – changing, evolving and maturing.  Living dashboards solve BI’s main problem; traditional BI can tell you only known unknowns—common, dependable metrics such as sales and customers by region but it can’t tell you ‘unknown unknowns,’ the questions you haven’t thought to ask. In this way, living dashboards are conversational. You ask questions, receive answers ponder them, ask more questions, and engage in a dialogue with your data. The hallmarks of a living dashboard include simplicity and intuitiveness. A living dashboard allows users to:

1. Ask and answer questions themselves – no queries or IT middlemen required
2. Add new data sources at will, in any combination required for the task at hand
3. Get answers quickly, almost instantly. No more waiting for reports to run
4. Change the configuration of the dashboard themselves on the fly without the help of IT
5. Share their dashboard with others. What’s the use of creating new metrics and KPIs if you can’t share them?

QlikView’s Business Discovery platform enables the creation of the living dashboards described above. To read more on living dashboards download this QlikView whitepaper.

Article by Carolyn Clark Carolyn Clark is Business Intelligence Account Manager at Eureka Solutions and specialises on QlikView BI software. Carolyn has a degree in Management Science and has many years’ experience in the software industry focussing on business process management & business insight products. To get in touch with Carolyn, email carolyn.clark@eurekasolutions.co.uk or call 01355 581 960.

• Empower your staff. Give them the systems they need, and use the same system to manage that process;
• Focus on information, rather than processes;
• Take IT investment seriously if not, you can be certain that a competitor will be doing so, and winning new business;
• Commit yourself to education and training. Spend all you like on an IT system, but never assume your people will just pick it up somehow;
• Data only becomes useful when you convert it into information and then act on that information. Make sure you have that flow running correctly;
• If you don’t have a CRM system yet, make the decision. In today’s environment, talking to your customers and understanding them is a must have.

You can read the full article here.

Our latest guest blog is from Dr Jim Hamill of Energise 2.0, a leading social media consultancy. A former lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, as well as being a leading academic, Dr Hamill has 30 years experience in international business management.

In this post Jim introduces Customer Experience Management.  You can hear more from Jim at Eureka360 on 27th October where he presents the seminar, “CRM: Get Social & Join the Revolution”.

Socialise the Customer Experience

Back in 2006 BSM (Before Social Media), we published an article entitled ‘Manage the Customer Experience and the Relationship Will Follow’.

The paper argued that the main drivers of future business success, in an era of customer empowerment, were the quality of your customer base; the strength of the relationship you have with them; and your ability to leverage that relationship (‘up’ and ‘cross’ sell). This requires an integrated and coordinated approach to building a Quality Customer Growth Programme (QCGP) aimed at Identifying, Acquiring, Retaining and Growing Quality Customers i.e. ‘High Value’, ‘High Growth’ potential customers.

Delivering exceptional customer experiences, especially at key ‘Moments of Truth’, is critical to building a successful QCGP. Positive experiences build customer loyalty, retention and growth. Negative experiences lead to customer defection.

Following our attendance at a recent Hubspot Inbound Marketing Workshop, where presenters spoke about ‘flooding the sales funnel with suspects’ (see our previous response here), we revisited our 2006 paper and would argue that the key principles of Customer Experience Management (CEM) are even more relevant in 2011 DSMR (During the Social Media Revolution).

A brief synopsis of the paper is presented below.

Paper Synopsis

The best way of explaining Customer Experience Management (CEM) is to compare it to more ‘traditional’ approaches to Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

In ‘traditional’ CRM, every customer interaction is seen as providing your organisation with an opportunity for improving its level of customer knowledge and understanding. Information captured at the point of interaction is used to build customer insight through profiling, micro-segmentation, predictive analysis etc.

The main objective is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales and marketing effort through delivering more focused, highly targeted campaigns, with products, services and promotional material being customised to the specific needs of clearly defined customer segments. The ultimate goal is complete personalisation of sales and marketing on a ‘1-to-1’ basis.

In other words, ‘traditional’ CRM is ‘About Us’. Tell ‘US’ more about yourself. ‘WE’ can then better target ‘OUR’ sales offerings.

Customer Experience CEM reverses this approach. In addition to viewing each interaction as an opportunity for learning more about your customers, the opposite is also true. Interactions provide your customers with an opportunity for learning more about you, your organisation, culture and attitudes. There is a clear ‘cause and effect’ relationship between what the customer learns at each interaction and their subsequent behaviour.

The key propositions of CEM can be summarised as follows:

• The real source of customer loyalty, retention and growth is the quality of the experience that each customer has in dealing with your organisation, not your ability to customise or personalise sales messages. Junk (e)mail is still junk even when it is personalised.
• Every time a customer interacts with your organisation, they experience what it is like to deal with your people, systems, organisation and culture. Customer experiences during these interactions, especially at key ‘Moments of Truth’ (MOT), will have a major impact on future behaviour. Positive experiences will help to build customer loyalty. Negative experiences lead to customer defection.
• Customer experiences occur across multiple ‘touch points’ (e.g. sales, customer service, call centres, reception desk, advertising, brochures, web sites, meetings, project management etc) and at different stages of the customer life cycle (sales prospect, recently acquired customer, long-term repeat customer etc). As companies cannot avoid providing experiences at each ‘touch point’, it is critical that these are proactively managed in ways that impact positively on future customer behaviour. Achieving consistency and quality across all ‘touch points’ is critical. Customer experiences are increasingly taking place on social media.
• Based on the above, CEM can be defined as the proactive management of the critical interactions that take place between an organisation and its customers in ways that deliver exceptional value to the customer and to the business. Managing positive customer experiences will generate loyalty, retention and growth. Negative experiences will lead to customer defection. CEM, therefore, should be an integral part of an organisation’s overall approach to customer and brand management.
• In terms of bottom line business benefits, effective CEM can deliver short, medium and longer term customer advantage – immediate improvements in customer satisfaction and retention, sustained customer loyalty and competitive differentiation.

Be Bold

The paper concluded that a coordinated and integrated approach to CEM is a key building block of a successful relationship management strategy. It should also be a key component of your brand management strategy. While brand expectations are built using traditional marketing channels, the actual delivery of the brand takes place through customer interactions. Brand image and reputation have become increasingly dependent on the experience customers have in dealing with your organisation. People remember experiences more than products or services, especially very good or very bad experiences. Customer dissatisfaction and attrition are the natural consequences of the failure to match brand expectations and brand experience.

Given the growing importance of social media to the above, we would argue that a key challenge for many organisations is to socialise the customer experience. Rather than looking at social media as a broadcast or PR channel, ‘spreading your content as widely as possible’ as recommended by the Inbound Marketing school, a more appropriate question to ask is how can we use social media to deliver exceptional experiences at all stages of the ‘Customer Journey’ with our organisation. That way you might just differentiate yourself from the noise, building the long-term loyalty and life-time value of your ‘Most Valuable’ and ‘Most Growable’ customers. At the same time, you will erect barriers that will stop your competitors stealing your best customers

Be Bold. Be Different. Be Social.

You can find out more about social media and our range of CRM solutions at Eureka360.

About Energise 2.0

Energise 2.0 provide an integrated range of Social Media services for building sustained business growth and profitability, delivered to the very highest international standards and fully customised for your business.

Working with a diverse range of clients, Energise 2.0 have developed an approach to Social Media that quite simply works.

In our latest guest blog, Melvin Fletcher from Datalinx provides an introduction to their barcoding and mobile solutions for Sage software. We are delighted that Datalinx will be exhibiting at our Eureka360 event so you can find out more about Datalinx and talk to Melvin on the day.

Over the last 12 months we have seen a significant shift in the acceptance of  “Tablet” technology within the business work place. As we are all aware, Apple changes the technology world making us desire products we didn’t know we wanted. This effect inevitably ripples into the business world and becomes the expectation for application providers to deliver apps on devices, in the same format, as that used to access the web, communicate via email and via social media in our personal life.

Suppliers of applications on mobile devices need to embrace this fast moving technology whilst ensuring that business processes are not compromised by the demand to deliver enterprise tools on devices such as tablets and Rugged PDA’s.

At Datalinx we see our applications helping businesses to mobilise their workforce not only within the four walls of a warehouse but through Sales Reps taking orders remotely and drivers delivering goods with PoD information. All of whom use the latest in Smartphones, Rugged PDA’s and Tablet devices to feed information back to the business where Sage is fully utilised.

We will be showcasing these features of our Warehouse Management and Mobile Order and Delivery application for Sage at Eureka360 and I will be on-hand to answer any Mobile Sage, Barcoding and Warehouse Management questions you may have.

About Datalinx

Datalinx are the market leader in barcoding systems that integrate into all levels of Sage business software. As a specialist in developing barcoding based applications for Sage, our significant experience in manufacturing and distribution ensures that we can rapidly implement our barcoding systems to meet business needs.

Our Warehouse Management systems provide functionally rich integrated business process capabilities that extend Sage operations.

Mobiles Sales and Delivery (van sales) extends this further to provide remote sales reps and delivery drivers with the ability to take sales orders, access client history and deliver orders with all information  updated into Sage in real-time, as is standard with all Datalinx software.

In our latest guest blog William Connor from

SharePoint: The power of internal CRM

Eamon (Breen – Managing Director of Inspired) and I sat in Microsoft collaborating, communicating and sharing knowledge with our colleagues as easily as if we were sitting beside each other, yet we typically met once a month. We were performing these tasks using Microsoft SharePoint. Yet when we talked to business owners, they wanted to do the same but didn’t know how and didn’t know where to start, despite having already purchased the SharePoint software.

We decided to leave Microsoft and set about building ‘an intranet out of the box’ solution called BizPortal.  We want to enable organisations to collaborate and share documents and information quickly and easily, to have their own internal CRM solution, where they are the customer. In addition to get a better return on the software they have already purchased from Microsoft.

Organisations have customers who are both internal and external who need to collaborate and share. Your staff need to be able to quickly and easily find relevant and up to date information. They need automated business processes that are easy to understand and quick to use. BizPortal is your internal CRM solution that enables your staff to improve how they work.

By streamlining your business processes, improving how you collaborate and share information will ultimately give you more time and better information to deal with your customers. BizPortal helps unify your organisation so that they are a more effective team.

Find out more about BizPortal and how SharePoint can help your business at Eureka360. Space is filling up fast so register today to avoid disappointment.

About Inspired Software & Services

Inspired Software and Services enables organisations who have invested in Microsoft technology to unlock the power of its full potential. Their product portfolio includes Intranets, Extranets, Business System automation and workflows.

Leading web developers,

Under the guidance of its founder and Managing Director, Tamlin Roberts, Mercurytide continues to grow and deliver award winning solutions for their clients. Established in 2001, Mercurytide is an internet development applications company whose skills lie in the development of complex interactive websites and whose client list includes SME’s, local councils, public bodies, multi-nationals and blue chip companies.

From bespoke systems to content writing, from print design to mobile apps, Mercurytide have the tried and tested experience and expertise to help improve the efficiency of your company, automate tasks or simplify processes – and once you have such a system, you won’t know what you did without it. In an ever changing technological landscape, Mercurytide recognises the need to encourage their customers to stay at the forefront, and is proactive in regularly suggesting improvements or new functionality to ensure their customer’s sites are up to date and delivering at peak performance.

Mercurytide differentiates itself in the market place through the high level of customer service they provide.  Mercurytide’s solutions are always derived from a two-way process of communication that starts well in advance of the first piece of code being written. The committed team at Mercurytide is skilled in discussing the technical aspects of each process in a non-technical manner, and they look forward to answering any questions you may have at the event.

Register for Eureka360 today.