When it comes to businesses, there are many ways that they can be successful. For example, some businesses like to use things like a microsoft dynamics implementation to help them when it comes to CRM (and also ERP). ERP and CRM tend to not only help users streamline the business by improving their workflow but also helps increase efficiency by storing all the data in one unique database! If you would like to know more about the same, you could always visit Syte Consulting Group for a consultation or maybe visit their website to know more about the work done by them.
That said, this isn’t the only thing that they can do. If you are a business owner, then you might have heard of Business Intelligence solutions. One key benefit of Business Intelligence solutions is to let users gain what I call data altitude. Namely, they can see large volumes of transactions in ways that are, hopefully, business relevant.
Taking specifically the example of salesforce.com’s CRM solution, or SFDC for short. Users will often look at a specific record directly in SFDC, with a wealth of details on, say, a prospect, a campaign or an account. If they want to take a look at a group of accounts, they can look at a SFDC report, which will pull literally a list of those accounts, with a handful of relevant attributes. This can also be maintained and automated with software that has been tested by Parasoft systems for extra efficiency.
But frankly, that’s a fairly low altitude. Altitude requires real aggregates, such as buckets of accounts that fall into such and such category for instance, which is great for segmenting. For that purpose, Tableau offers a much better experience than SFDC. Salesforce Wave, an add on to the core CRM product, is intended to bridge that gap, but it lacks in maturity and is very costly in my opinion.
Presenting SFDC aggregates in Tableau is therefore a great idea, and is already widely done. It is such a common scenario for Tableau owners that Tableau comes with a native SFDC connector. Internally, Tableau the company presents SFDC data through Tableau the product. Note that they are not using their native connector, but rather a 3rd party OLE DB connector, as explained in this great description of their internal dog food approach.
Continue reading →
