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CRM & Business Intelligence
by: Joe Roberts, Principal Consultant,
BECP, SLE, MCP
So why did you purchase a CRM system? Well, if you’re like
most small to medium sized businesses the answer to that question is: to create
and maintain a clear picture of customers from first contact through purchase.
Ok… good answer. Now, why did you purchase and HR system? Why did you
purchase an accounting system? What you will find is that each system was
purchase to solve a problem:
1.
Manage our employees
2.
Manage our finances
3.
Manage our sales process
We bring in Business Intelligence into the fold to provide
us with a 360o view of our business and facilitate quick accurate
decision making. But that presents a problem doesn’t it? To really have a 360o
view of an employee don’t we have to tie an employee in the CRM system to the
corresponding employee in the HR system? How about getting an accurate view of
customer purchases? The CRM system allows us to create proposals and a proposal
is a sale right? No, to do this we have to connect a customer to an Invoice in
the accounting system and probably to the accounting history for that customer.
If you are like most small to medium business, each of
these systems was created in a vacuum. Meaning each of these systems was
implemented without regard to the other. After all, the problem you were trying
to solve with your HR system had nothing to do with the sales process.
Introducing Business Intelligence
The introduction of BI to your enterprise did not create
this problem, it only highlighted it. This problem existed from the moment each
system was implemented. So how do we solve it? In a word:
Data Integration. Data
Integration can take relatively simple forms such as Master Data Management or
much more complex and complete forms such as Data Warehousing. No matter which
direction you choose the first step to solving this problems must be to clearly
identify your System of Record (SOR).
System of Record
On the surface the concept of System of Record can be very
simple but in practice it is often difficult to maintain. The first things you
will need to define are your enterprise entities. A good rule of thumb here is
to say “What things within my business do I have questions about?”
·
Customers
·
Employees
·
Customer Sales
·
Customer Contact
·
Sales History
·
Lines of Business
·
Product Categories
·
Product Sales
·
Product Discounts
·
Product Cost
·
Invoices
·
Invoice Items
This is referred to as defining the measures and dimensions
of our business. The measures are the numbers that will define the answers; the
dimension gives the number context. How much product we sold, while being a
somewhat useful measure, doesn’t usually provide much helpful analysis unless we
can define a context.
·
How much we sold by
Customer or Employee
·
Average sales per invoice
·
Total Sales by Line of
Business
So how does all of this relate to System of Record? Well a
System of Record is where we define a single version of the truth. I know, you
thought truth was just truth. It is either true or not, right? Well that may be
true (no pun intended) philosophically but not in business. In business there
can often be multiple versions of the truth. Trying to create Business
Intelligence from multiple versions of the truth will usually result in a single
version of a lie. Take for instance a customer address. Does your CRM system
record customer addresses? How about your accounting system? Which one is the
truth? Probably depends on your point of view doesn’t it?
Defining a System of Record puts a stake in the ground.
·
Our CRM system contains
the correct customer information
·
Our Accounting system defines our
customer sales
·
Our HR system defines our
employees
In all matters where customer addresses conflict, CRM wins.
This also means that diligence must be paid to maintain correctness with the CRM
system and updating other systems like Accounting and HR to reflect our single
version of the truth.
Tying it all together
To connect these disparate systems can be
difficult and will often depend on your definition of Business Intelligence.
Enterprise Reporting
Where possible, when defining an entity within
one system and that system is not the System of Record for that entity make sure
you use the identity definition from the SOR when creating them. For Example;
when you create a salesperson record in the CRM system make sure their employee
id is same as their employee id in the HR system. If you’re primary BI need is
reporting this will allow you to link CRM activities to like customer contacts
and proposals to HR activities like employee goals.
If you have more ambitious BI goals like query and analysis
or dashboards then you’ll need to take this a step further into truly integrated
data and data warehousing.
Data Warehousing
Here we would look to Master Data Management
(MDM) to solve our problem. Here we would use our SOR to define the truth and
link that truth to other systems by matching the SOR identity to the identities
of that entity in other systems. Here we would create an Employee record and all
of its attributes as well as the system id to identify that employee in the CRM
system and the accounting system.
Summary
No matter how you slice it, it all begins with
the definition of System of Record. This stake in the ground is vital to linking
data between systems and producing a single version of the truth.
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