SAP Sales Cloud, and more specifically Cloud for Customer (C4C), is intended to provide good customer experience. The highly integrable “Cloud” from SAP occupies one of the fundamental places in the implemented C / 4 Hana environments. This means that it often processes more data than what’s visible directly on the user interface. Could an agile, lightweight “CRM” tool also be a solid analytical tool?
C4C’s reporting capabilities are often unknown and underestimated. “SAP Cloud CRM” can not only be the data origin for harvesters such as Power BI or Tableau, but also itself present valuable data to the user in an accessible form. It is worth briefly explaining the mechanisms behind a personalized report visible to the end user.
Based on preconfigured or designed by the system administrator or analyst data sources, reports and report views are created. The entire process is largely intuitive. The use of reports is possible at the analysis level data from the Management perspective, e.g. sales reports, where we analyze team, region or unit data according to some specific criteria.
But also, at the User level (e.g. merchant, manager, customer service agent), where the prepared report view is eventually presented on the screen of a specified system user. The what so called box standard already provides a variety of preconfigured reports that are ready to use for sales analysis (an example provided above).
C4C is a CRM class system that is primarily intended to ensure better customer relations and consequently maximize sales, a game of numbers in which each conscious organization tracks essential data. The common denominator seems to be KPIs, through which organizations individually define the measure of its own success.
In order to monitor business-critical data, the cloud-based tool from SAP provides dashboards. Which are highly configurable panels and can be precisely tailored to meet precise business requirements.
The cockpit presented above has been prepared to handle such precise customer requirements. It allows the manager to monitor the team’s performance in terms of meetings held, current tickets of his team according to status (e.g. customer inquiries), but also assembles the most vital sales data from the current month (e.g. net sales) and presents it in a sophisticated but transparent manner – such as the presented in Fig. 2 list of the reasons for rejecting an against the chance of success estimated by the trader.
Illustrative and oftentimes used by companies are individual KPIs – clear indicators behind which stand cutting-edge data analysis mechanisms. These combine complex, multi-level data generated from one or more reports and presented in an accessible and transparent way. C4C, as befits a CRM class tool, offers a wide range of KPIs design and visual presentation capabilities. Above is an example of a KPI – sales value included in the aspect of e.g. the current month, and below three options for presenting this indicator.
In order to design a KPI, it is necessary to define the goal it is intended to measure in the first place. If we stick to the SMART paradigm (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound) – that defines a business goal. KPI allows us to understand progress towards achieving the indicated purpose. Additionally, the tool offers extensive possibilities of presenting the created KPIs depending on the business roles of system users.
It is best to start discussing the use of analytics at an early stage of a SAP implementation project. Experienced consultants, who can comprehend client’s requirements, are able to design processes around the analytical needs of the business and the desired indicators. It is usually feasible to build a report based on data from existing business processes.
However, redesigning a process in order to obtain certain data is most often effort consuming if not impossible. That is the very reason why a holistic approach pays off in the end by leading to designing an optimal solution for data gathering and use.
