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Customer Success Stories
A cure for better customer insight
Picis implements FastTrack BI for unleashing vital CRM data
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“With ClearPeaks’ FastTrack BI solution we are now able to better analyze our data, segment our customers, measure the ROI of our marketing initiatives and provide an automated and rolled-up sales forecast.”
Kevin P.
Executive vice president of Client Operations
Picis
Success for a market leader like Picis, a worldwide provider of information systems for surgery, emergency department and intensive care units across the hospital enterprise, is based on an in-depth understanding of their customers, the marketplace and best-in-class internal processes.
With the implementation of the market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system by Siebel, Picis hoped to bring together the key information to achieve a more comprehensive view of their customers. By providing their sales, marketing, and client operations teams with the necessary CRM tool and processes, the company built a solid foundation for the collection and management of customer interaction data. However like many organizations, Picis faced a huge challenge – unleashing the customer intelligence contained within their CRM system.
The Project
With all the data available in their CRM system, but limited capability to tap into this fertile source of information, Picis engaged ClearPeaks – an experienced leader in the delivery of customer intelligence solutions. The objective: Provide all relevant Picis business units with an easy-to-use yet comprehensive dashboarding, reporting and analysis capability across all levels of the organization; and allow for automated refresh and delivery of the vital customer intelligence.
The Approach
The ClearPeaks Enterprise Intelligence Framework, a foundation for requirements analysis and business process mapping, served as an excellent starting point to identify the requirements of the various departments ranging from customer services, client managers to the sales and marketing team (see figure 1). The ClearPeaks team performed an in-depth analysis with the different Picis end-user groups to understand the various layers of dashboards and reports required to cover all aspects from performance management to the operational reporting needs, the bread-and-butter of the Siebel end-users.
Figure 1 ClearPeaks Enterprise Intelligence Framework
With a clear understanding of Picis’ overall requirements, ClearPeaks identified the most suitable and cost-effective business intelligence (BI) solution for Picis. The vital components of the proposed BI Framework included the following:
• Business Objects® 6.5 – The world’s leading BI solution by BusinessObjects
• FastTrack BI™ for Siebel CRM – ClearPeaks’ comprehensive end-user reporting environment for Siebel CRM, which is cost-effective and rapid to deploy
• ReportMessenger™ – ClearPeaks’ automated solution for delivering up-to-the-minute business intelligence
• ReportPacks™ – ClearPeaks’ dashboard & reporting solutions for rapid implementations
• Custom Dashboards & Reporting – Custom-designed dashboards & reports
Basis for a solid BI foundation at Picis was the industry leading Business Objects’ enterprise reporting solution. BusinessObjects Enterprise is a BI platform that powers the management and the secure deployment of specialized end-user tools for reporting, query and analysis, performance management, and analytic applications on a proven, scalable, and open architecture.
Creating a solid BI infrastructure
The required Business Objects components with their respective development, integration and production environments were set up on the BI server after successful deployment of a Microsoft® SQL Server™ environment that hosts the mirror of the Siebel production database. To allow for automated report refresh and delivery, ClearPeaks’ ReportMessenger was also implemented on the BI server.
In parallel to the infrastructure setup, the ClearPeaks development team initiated the adaptation of its unique FastTrack BI for Siebel CRM, a comprehensive end-user reporting environment to Picis’ Siebel CRM customization. With over 1,500 objects, 500 filters and eight contexts, this Business Objects-based universe covers virtually all fields of the business areas within the Siebel CRM environment: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Campaigns, Activities, Service Requests and Products. Within a two-week time period, ClearPeaks added the additional required objects and filters identified in the discovery phase to FastTrack BI. The team was now ready for the next phase – turning data into information via meaningful dashboards and reports.
Visualization of the rich business data
With ClearPeaks’ pre-built ReportPacks as a basis and the BI infrastructure in place, the team set out to develop the initial core reports Picis required to effectively manage their business.
Services Dashboard (Balanced Scorecard)
This comprehensive, html-based dashboard provides the Picis senior executive team with the key performance metrics for the management of the client operations organization. Starting from a top-level quarterly or monthly view, the dashboard allows users to drill down through the organizational and product hierarchies and also view the various metrics by company location.
The easy-to-use navigation through hyperlinks, as well as the ability to review the metrics from previous months or quarters makes this dashboard an indispensable management tool
(see figure 2).
Figure 2 Client operations scorecard - easy-to-use html drill down
Services Turnaround Time and Services Backlog Reports
The key objective of the Services Turnaround Time and Services Backlog Reports was to have an accurate and actionable view of the key parameters turn-around time (TAT) and backlog for the Picis client operations organization. Both dashboards built with BusinessObjects full client are html reports, which combine graphical and tabular elements and provide the capability to drill down by various dimension hierarchies (organization, location, and product). The reports are used by the executive team, as well as the client services team managers to support their decision making, enhance team performance, pinpoint areas for improvement and identify headcount requirements (see figure 3).
Figure 3 Services backlog report - graphical components with html drill down
Pipeline, Forecast and Data Quality Report for Sales
Picis’ sales executives and their managers required a completely different approach.
As frontline employees with the majority of their time spent out of the office, Picis sales executives preferred a reporting solution that would push their pipeline and forecast reports to their e-mail inbox.
The set of five key reports within a Microsoft® Excel® workbook are built with Business Objects full client and automatically refreshed and delivered via ClearPeaks’ ReportMessenger.
The sales data contained within the report rolls up through the hierarchical layers – every recipient sees only the data they see in the Siebel CRM environment, ensuring full data security at all times. With their vital sales-related information conveniently provided in Microsoft Excel, updated and delivered once a week or available at any time on demand, Picis’ sales executives were able to automate the historically manual forecasting process and as a result save valuable time (see Figure 4).
Figure 4 Sales report - the pipeline summary provides a roll-up of sales pipeline data
Pervasive BI - FastTrack BI at the fingertips of Picis’ employees
To further leverage the potential of FastTrack BI, ClearPeaks provided a hands-on training to a core set of users at Picis. After a short period of time these users were able to benefit from FastTrack BI and ReportMessenger to extract, analyze, report and deliver the information contained within their CRM system throughout the organization.
The status today Today, Picis uses FastTrack BI for Siebel CRM to access data from all business areas of the Siebel CRM application. With this information at their fingertips, Picis has enhanced data quality and compliance, turned their CRM data into actions, gained meaningful customer insight and further improved their closed loop sales and marketing process.
ClearPeaks continues to deliver BI services to Picis through a support and maintenance agreement that was signed as the result of the successful implementation of FastTrack BI and ReportMessenger. “ClearPeaks has been a true partner throughout our implementation and beyond,” concludes David S.
Other brands and product names mentioned in this ClearPeaks Success Story may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby acknowledged. |
Solution Overview
The Company
Picis is an established provider of innovative healthcare information technology solutions designed to transform the delivery of patient care in the high-acuity areas of the hospital, including the emergency department, operating and recovery rooms and intensive care units. Picis offers the most advanced suite of integrated products focused on these life-critical areas of the hospital where the patients are the most vulnerable, the care process is the most complex and an increasing majority of hospital costs are incurred.
The Industry
High-tech / Software
Goals
• Provide a cost-effective reporting solution on Siebel CRM to achieve ROI
• Empower Picis employees to analyze and report on key CRM data
• Provide a core set of CRM Dashboards
• Automate report refresh and delivery
Solution
Implementation of ClearPeaks’ FastTrack BI for Siebel CRM and ReportMessenger utilizing the Business Objects 6.5 platform to provide the most cost-effective reporting and analysis solution available for Siebel CRM today. Rollout of a core set of management dashboards and reports, automatically refreshed and delivered to key players in the services organization, as well as the sales and marketing organization to support decision-making and performance improvements.
Benefits
• Reporting and analysis capability of all customer touchpoints for full circle customer intelligence
• Automation of the manual forecasting process, improvements to campaign effectiveness, data quality and compliance
• Customer support resource optimization and identification of best practices
“FastTrack BI and ReportMessenger have quickly become invaluable tools for Picis. I wouldn’t even venture a guess at the number of hours that we save across the organization on a monthly basis. No longer do we have staff building, compiling and emailing the same reports each month,”
David S., vice president and general manager of Picis’ enterprise solutions division.
“ClearPeaks assisted us with the creation of a number of reports and our first functional dashboards, but more importantly they gave us the skills and knowledge to create these on our own,”
says David S.
“This capability allows us to be more competitive, offer better service to our customers and provide a faster response to changing market conditions.”
Kevin P., Picis
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Not missing a beat in music sales
Universal Music Netherlands profits from BI in sales and marketing
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“ClearPeaks distinguish themselves by a transparent, non-aggressive, yet very professional approach that does not leave one totally dependant for a long time. And they deliver quick results.”
Bart E.
Commercial Director
Universal Music Netherlands
Tuning into its sales and marketing data is fundamental for decision makers at Universal Music Netherlands (UMNL), a subsidiary of one of the world’s leading music companies, to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions.
Like many organizations, UMNL faced the challenge that a clear and consolidated view of their key marketing and sales information was not available. Disparate information systems and a complex customer setup and hierarchy further complicated manual reporting processes; little information was available about the effects of promotional activities and campaigns on the evolution of sales. Without this important information at the fingertips of the relevant departments, it was difficult to make decisions on how to optimize the closed-loop sales and marketing processes and improve sales in specific stores or regions.
The Project
To accomplish their goals, UMNL engaged ClearPeaks to support the internal IT department with the integration of external marketing and sales information into their local data warehouse and develop a comprehensive set of reports. In addition to enabling visibility of important corporate information to all layers from top-, marketing-, and product- management to sales representatives, Universal Music also required an automated report and stable refresh and distribution solution to save time and resources.
“In the beginning we were hesitant to work with a near-shore company but now that the environment is up and running and the delivery of the reports is reliable and stable, the initial scepticism took a sharp 180 degree turn. The “cyber colleague” has been accepted 100%,” says Bart E. UMNL’s project lead.
The Steps
The Universal Music project presented an end-to-end engagement from an initial analysis phase to execution of the final solution. The required reports had to be distributed to 50 end-users.
In the first phase of the project an in-depth business requirements gathering was carried out. After several workshops both with internal departments, but also with external companies, the first development component was delivered by creating a middle layer that would feed the upcoming Decisional Support System (DSS) platform. This platform was linked to the local data warehouse.
After the implementation of the DSS platform and the implementation of the BI solution comprised of a BusinessObjects universe on the data warehouse, ClearPeaks developed the desired reports for UMNL.
As part of this reporting package, five key reports with vital marketing and sales information were developed. The reports allow UMNL’s decision makers to effectively gauge their campaign effectiveness and implement activities to increase sales in specific target markets. Two of these reports are demonstrated below.
The priority report shows the ship & sales figures for a compact disc (CD). By having this report at their fingertips, UMNL is able to evaluate the overall status of a project against specific weekly-, 90 days-, and LOP-targets. If the results for a specific CD are poor, sales management can decide to improve sales by starting a promotional action in the relevant shops. See figure 1.
Figure 1 Priority Report
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“The highest priority report is a one-page dashboard overview of the status of a specific project, which is used to evaluate results against targets. Decisions to keep investing or stop investing in an overall project is almost completely based upon this report,” Bart points out.
Figure 2 displays the daily report. The figures show an evolution of daily sales in shops compared to daily shipments. Middle and top management can monitor financial and logistic key performance indicators when reviewing this report. With daily over the counter sales information effects from promotional activities is immediately visible.
Figure 2 Daily Report
Click to enlarge
According to Bart E., “The daily report enables product and marketing management to monitor the outcomes of their promotional endeavours, allowing them to evaluate the programs on a daily basis and make quicker decisions than in the past. Effective promotion campaigns can be extended or intensified well in time where in the old days by the time we had figured out what made things work the momentum to act had lapsed. Ineffective campaigns can now be stopped prematurely and resources can be re-allocated towards the more effective campaigns.”
As an additional component of the BI infrastructure, ClearPeaks’ ReportMessenger was implemented and setup to automatically refresh and distribute the most important sales and marketing reports throughout the organization cost effectively.
“The ClearPeaks’ ReportMessenger tool has proven to be very useful in the delivery process of the reports. It automates the distribution of (specific parts of) the reports to the relevant people and/or customers and third parties. It saves a lot of time and brings something that is crucial to effective reporting: rhythm and stability,” adds Bart E.
Conclusion
With the consolidation of vital data sources to one data warehouse and the presentation of information in well designed reporting packages, Universal Music is now able to make grounded decisions about sales and marketing issues. Necessary actions to increase sales and improve profits can now be taken with the relevant information at the fingertips of decision makers throughout the organization.
Additionally, ReportMessenger cost effectively automates the manual and task of report refresh and distribution and therefore allows UMNL to further extend the reach of vital information to all its employees.
With the successful completion of the project at UMNL, ClearPeaks continues to provide maintenance for their BI system and future projects are already in the definition phase.
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Project at a glance
The Company
Universal Music Netherlands is part of the Universal Music Group, the world's leading music company with wholly owned record operations or licensees in 77 countries. Its businesses also include Universal Music Publishing Group, one of the industry's largest global music publishing operations.
The Industry
Music Industry
Goals
• Provide a decision-support system (DSS) for marketing and sales
• Integrate external marketing information with a local data warehouse and visualize this data
• Build a reliable customer hierarchy
• Implement a cost-effective report refresh and delivery process
Solution
Implementation of a scalable BI platform to support the decision-making processes in sales and marketing. Automation of report distribution with ReportMessenger™ to improve efficiencies and extend the reach of information throughout the organization.
Benefits
• Enhanced visibility of corporate information to all layers of the organization
• More information-based decision making to support the negotiation of pricing, optimization of campaigns, and adaptation of supply to demand
• Improved ROI in less than one year with the report automation and improved decision-making processes
• Increased user satisfaction and trust in information delivered
“The reporting structure has had a profound effect on the decision-making process on all levels within the marketing and sales organisation.”
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HP gains a better perspective through corporate account reporting
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“Having these reports at our fingertips impacts HP’s corporate accounts business by providing us a worldwide perspective.”
Dieter W.
CAR Worldwide Sales Operations Manager
Hewlett-Packard
Overview
When a company such as Hewlett-Packard lacks a global view of its customer data, it is difficult to make informed decisions. ClearPeaks’ customer embarked on a reporting project to address this issue. The objective: deliver a single, comprehensive, worldwide reporting solution for the corporate and enterprise customer business (code-named “CAR”), supporting the needs of both management and sales operations while offering high-level insight into the company’s most valued customers.
First Steps
The CAR project team, supported by a ClearPeaks BI business analyst, set out to define the business reporting requirements, metrics and dashboards. The team analyzed functional gaps in current processes, identified and resolved business issues, and highlighted strategic and operations challenges. Critical questions asked during this process included:
• What, where and when is the customer buying?
• What amounts of revenue and profit do corporate and enterprise customers bring?
• Who are our most valuable customers in terms of profit?
• Are today’s business transactions in line with long-term pricing and contractual agreements?
Once the requirements and business/IT priorities were identified, ClearPeaks specified, developed and delivered the corporate accounts report packs and dashboards to the different user levels. These reports and dashboards were published on the customer’s secure internal portal, allowing easy online access to recent and historical information and enabling more informed decision-making.
Expanding the Solution
With the success of the first phase, the solution was expanded by enriching existing reports and dashboards with additional customer-focused metrics. To further support business needs, vital data sources such as indirect channel business data, worldwide opportunity funnel and operational orders, and shipment information were included in the reporting solution. In addition, the focus was extended from corporate and enterprise accounts to all global and public sector accounts.
Caption: CAR Scope Releases
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The Outcome — A Comprehensive Solution
By harnessing the rich corporate data provided through the CAR data warehouse, HP’s business users now have secure access to a comprehensive set of dashboards and reports provided through the portal, as illustrated in the table below.
Click to enlarge
For in-depth analysis and reporting, CAR also provides business analysts with a richly detailed, ad-hoc reporting tool. Driven by a Business Objects™ Web Intelligence environment and a Business Objects universe, analysts have rapid and convenient access to all corporate data to support their day-to-day business information requirements.
The integration of an account-focused, web-based reporting solution improved the quality of HP’s decision-making and helped drive incremental sales — a major achievement, especially considering that corporate and enterprise customers represent 50% of HP’s business.
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Project at a glance
The Client
Hewlett-Packard (HP): worldwide supplier of market-leading technology solutions designed to meet the needs of individual consumers, small and mid-sized businesses, enterprises and public sector customers in more than 170 countries.
The Industry
High technology
Challenge
Implement a centralized Reporting Portal, supporting both internal management and sales operations and enabling visibility of corporate and enterprise customers’ key business performance indicators
Solution
Develop a web-based reporting solution to capture the entire spectrum of corporate and enterprise customer financials in an easy-to-access, secure portal
Benefits
• Enable a high-level view of corporate and enterprise customers’ business performance indicators
• Provide the ability to view accounts’ performance by industry, region and business unit
• Deliver a secure and centralized portal with easy access for all users
• Improve sales team satisfaction with enhanced visibility into corporate account business activity, resulting in improved customer satisfaction
• Facilitate decision-making — from sales operations to management, both regionally and globally — based on common and consistent business information.
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High-tech industry leader explores pricing practices and boosts profits
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Overview
Given enough time in any market most companies have experienced price pressures & heightened competition resulting in an increase in sales volume but a decrease in revenues and/or drastically reduced margins.
To avoid this situation, the companies’ decision makers, business analysts, and sales managers from the server and storage division needed a thorough understanding of pricing, margin, orders and sales practices in order to analyze the impact of short- and long-term financial and business implications.
The solution was a new customized reporting environment created to deliver a clear understanding of trends, pricing and discounting business processes, utilizing up-to-date, data from various source systems with the ability to view the data in different dimensions (i.e., geographical, product specific, etc.) and in various levels of detail.
First Steps
Deliver fast answers to critical questions
First, the existing business situation was analyzed and a series of essential questions were compiled that served as the basis for building the new reporting environment:
• What is the profile of each approved deal?
• What is the global view of approved deals for the coming months? (i.e., expected margins, sales, fulfilments, etc.)
• Which deals return the lowest margins?
With a clear analysis and goals for the project set, data from various sources was combined in a central data warehouse. Using the market leading BI Tool Business Objects a set of html dashboards was soon developed and put into place to cover the questions posed by the companies’ analysts. Shortly thereafter an ad-hoc environment was developed to complement and expand upon the html dashboards providing the customer the muscle necessary to answer targeted questions regarding the pricing practices of its product division.
Click to enlarge
Next Steps
Fine-tune data to gain a competitive edge
The ability to compare actual vs. predicted sales and cost data to stay ahead of the competition meant enriching the reporting environment and fine-tuning the data used to create this reporting capability. By combining yet another layer of sales-out data with the existing environment the customer was quickly able to further increase business insight and improve pricing performance.
Success
The customer gained comprehensive knowledge of their pricing practices and the ability to generate a solid forecast of the division’s projected contribution to bottom-line profitability. The result is an even more insightful and strategic look into the original set of questions posed by the project team—with answers that translate into increased profit margins for the server and storage division.
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Solution Overview
The Client
Worldwide supplier of market-leading technology solutions specifically designed to meet the needs of individual consumers, from small and mid-sized businesses to enterprises and public sector, in more than 170 countries. Revenue 2004: 80B$.
The Industry
High technology
Challenge
The customers’ server and storage division was tasked with increasing profitability through an improved understanding of critical pricing practices and their short- and long-term financial and business implications.
Solution
Development of a focused and detailed reporting environment with html dashboards and ad-hoc reporting environment, built to offer different levels of detail and viewing options.
Benefits
• Increased profits
• Improved management of the deal pipeline
• End-to-end view of the sales process
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Siebel challenge
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Overview
Being the UK No.1 provider of postal services & solutions, our customer had very clear objectives in order to maintain their position and to further differentiate themselves from their competitors. One key initiative was to provide a more complete global customer view, enabling the sales teams to collaborate globally on strategic sales deals, manage more effectively the rolled up sales pipeline and decrease the overall sales cycle time to deal closure.
Background
Our customer implemented an overly configured Siebel 7.7 CRM solution to the point that this solution was costly to support and new modifications were complex to bring to production.
In addition, a variety of differing reporting solutions existed for each business group including Crystal Reports, MS Excel and others.
The Project: ''The Siebel Challenge''
The “Siebel Challenge” project was born in response to adverse business opinion of the existing, complex and high maintenance CRM solution. The objective was to provide an “easy to use” business reporting solution while ensuring minimal coding and application customization and to provide flexibility to accommodate varying user communities with different business requirements.
First Steps
In the initial phases of the project, several workshops were held with the main business subject matter experts to identify detailed dashboard reporting requirements, by user groups and aligned to process variations between product divisions.
The methodology adopted in order to obtain clear requirements was to focus on high level business needs - Siebel entities and subject areas - and progressively drilling down to the object level analysis.
During the initial workshop, the Analytics experts presented to the users the capabilities of the tool, in terms of subject areas. Examples were given on how different subject areas cannot be combined in a unique report and therefore the content of a certain subject areas has to be thought through depending on the Siebel entities that the user needs to combine. Examples of both compatible and non-compatible Siebel entities were given to expose the fact that the requirements need to have a clear business justification.
Next Steps
Once the main subject areas required for reporting were defined, the next step was to define the requested dimensions and facts in line with business key performance indicators, including a gap analysis to differentiate vanilla versus customized dimensions and facts.
The Outcome
Once the requirements and technical design process was completed and signed off by the customer, the Siebel analytics core technical development was ready to start. The outcome of these next two phases led to the delivery of the eight key business subject areas identified in the initial phase, allowing user access to build their own reports using the Siebel Analytics interface: Siebel Answers.
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Project at a glance
The Company
Providing packing and posting solutions and related services to enterprises, small businesses and consumers on country-based level
The Industry
Services
Challenge
• To provide a cost effective, improved and functionality rich BI solution
• Align as best as possible to the SIEBEL Analytics “out of the box” BI analytics solution
Solution
Implementation of Siebel Business Analytics 7.8, Siebel Delivers and Usage Accelerator, to 400 Sales Person and 350 remote users to create a single, comprehensive view of its operations and unify reporting results
Benefits
• Global sales pipeline visibility
• Decreased time to closure for key sales opportunities
• Improved customer satisfaction & opportunity management
• One BI solution for all, relieving a resource intensive activity and refocusing efforts to value added activities
• Reduced cost per seat against market place benchmarks
• Improved, standardized & streamlined processes for all users, maximizing customer access points or customer self-service.
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