Introduction - Salesforce Analytics Product Management

[dcunni]

I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself to the community. I've recently joined the Salesforce product management organization to focus on our dashboard and reporting capabilities and overall direction. I know this is an area where our customers are already doing some amazing things and I'm certainly aware of many of the enhancement requests that have already been submitted.

That said, I'd love it if you could take a minute and submit the top 5 things you love and the top 5 things you don't love (hate is too strong a word!) about our analytics. I'll then post this information back to the group.

I look forward to hearing from you. Please be sure to let me know a little bit about the size of your implementation, anything that is unique to your organization that you think I should know, and whether you're planning to use our analytics with other BI tools / data warehouse.

Thanks!

Darren Cunningham (dcunningham@salesforce.com)

[Kingsley]

Hey Darren, welcome to the forums!

[thusker]

OK . . . here we go:

Like
1.  Ease of creating reports (picking fields, reordering columns, customizing in general).  Anyone in our company can create/edit basic reports they need pretty easily.

2.  Dashboards in general (ability to provide managers/execs/others with snapshots of the business)  Managers absolutely love having Dashboards.

3.  Views - Users really like going to the Accounts/Opportunity tabs and creating custom views that they can access easily.

Dislike a Great Deal
1.  Inability to report across several tables within SFDC at once - We have to go through a lot of manual processes and Excel gymnastics to report on things like: Contacts from Accounts where there were opportunites with certain products involved related to particular campaigns.  You just can't pull data in a single report from all the areas we need to (that I would think would be a common need)

2.  Inability to display reports within SFDC in descending/ascending row value fashion - Would REALLY like the ability to do what we can in Dashboards within the actual reports with regard to displaying "Top X Values" or showing summaries based on descending/ascending values.  Example: I run a summary report showing Account sales in North America for current FY--but I want to see only the Top 50 in Descending order of sales.  Again, I either have to use a Dashboard (which has some limits) or export into Excel and manipulate the data.  Give us a way to choose to group by row values ascending/descneding and choose a "maximum values displayed"

3.  Inability to do "exclusionary reports" inside SFDC - Not sure if that's the right way to put it, but here is an example--I have TONS of requests for this.  Lets say we are looking for upselling opportunities, so I want to run an opportunity report with products that will display all opportunities where we sold let's say 10 or more of Product X but that DID NOT include another product that would complement those first products.  From what I can see (and after spending an hour on the line with SFDC support), there is no way to do this.  I need to be able to run something like a matrix report where I can query for these kinds of situations. 

4. Inability to automatically distribute report data via email - There are lots of requests to have standard reports (like channel sales data) sent periodically to groups of users via email . . . like being able to create our own "Update Reminders".  Anything like this has to be done manually and I just don;t do it because it's not manageable. 

5. Inability to export "Customizable Forecast Views" to Excel - We have been using customizable forecasting for over a year and managers/reps are constantly asking why they can't export info from that tab (and the "views" they see) into excel like they can with standard reports.

[dlutchner]

Darren,

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to add ideas. I completely agree with the past posts ideas of improvements.

I think in general sense us experienced users need more powerful capabilities to build reports. For example an SQL type language that can cross any object (accounts, cases etc).

Due to the current limitations I have had to uses Excel and Access a lot. For instance I use the Salesforce Office Edition to link a number of reports to an Excel Spreadsheet. Then I link Access to that Excel Spreadhseet to create an SQL quesry across multiple objects. i.e. Cases to Contracts via accounts. Then I create an  Excel Pivot table (Connected to the Access table) and Pivot Chart to summarize. Sounds complex? It is.

thanks

[AMartin]

Hi Darren,

Here are few things that I don't like about the analytics capabilities of the application.  Or how about we be a little more positive and just say that they are feature requests. 

1. Reports - Inability to do "Outer" joins.  ex. I would like to be able to run a report that shows which Accounts do not have opportunities.  Or Accounts that do not have a Contract.  Now I have to export to Excel and run a query in a data base application.

2. Reports.  Inablilty of some objects to use "My (team) filters".   I have over 300 users and creating a standard set of reports for everyone is difficult if some objects (ex Contracts, User login reports) have to be customized at the Advanced Filter level just so a user/manager can see only their information.

3. Reports.  Inability to use ALL standard date filters in the  Advanced Filters lists.

4.  Dashboards - Inability to group dashboard data at the dashboard level.  Grouping a dashboard component is actually determined by how I group the underlying Reports chart.  That means I have to create multiple reports just to show the data grouped in different formats.  ex.  If I want a dashboard that shows Opportunities Sold last week grouped by Owner Role, Opportunity Owner and Account, I have to create 3 separate reports that are filtered the exact same way except for how the chart is grouped.  I would like to see the same functionality as an Excel Pivot table/charts.  I should be able to create multiple dashboard elements from one report and be able to group it as I wish.

5. Dashboards.  Inability to run dashboards as the Current User.  As I said before, I have over 300 users.  I would like to create a set of Sales Rep dashboards, that would show only the data of the person running it.  I don't want to have to individualize dashboard's for everyone.  Getting the users to clone a set of dashboards and changing the "Running User" is not really an option either.  When we want to make changes to the dashboard, they would have to delete the old dashboard and start the cloning process again.  Remember, sfdc is supposed to be an efficiency tool.

6.  Dashboards/ Reports folders.  Inability of users to edit items in Read/Write folders.  Back to the 300 users again.  I have several Power Users that maintain Reports for their teams so I've created Report folders  and given them Read/Write access.  So they can add new reports to the folder but not edit them once they are there.  So I guess I'm asking for more granular permissions for report folders.  I would like to give specific users Read/Write/Edit permissions to a report folder while at the same time other users only get Read access.

Thanks for listening.

Aiden

[Rick.Banister]

Take a look at Relational Junction. This product creates a local database data warehouse from your Salesforce data. The bonus is that it's a two-way warehouse -- feed it data from external sources and you can populate Salesforce. Replication can be as often as every 5 minutes. You are free to invent any kind of report you want using conventional Business Intelligence tools.  See http://www.sesamesoftware.com/salesforceintegration for more info. You can contact the vendor directly at (877) 496-6400.

[AMartin]

I'm sure your software works fine Rick but that's not the point of this thread.  We have written code to move data back and forth from sfdc to an sql database.  Besides, my TCO goes out the window if I have to keep relying on third party vendors to improve salesforce functionality.  There haven't been any real upgrades in salesforce's report engine in a while and I'm hoping Darren's post signals that will change soon.

Aiden

[Rick.Banister]

Our research and experience shows that a full 2-way warehouse ability that is stable, fault-tolerant, efficent, and secure would cost over $200,000 to develop, and at least half that per year to support, unless you are donating your services. Our product has a price of $8,000 plus $40 per user per year, equivalent to minimum wage. That's going to improve your TCO because you no longer have to fool with the API or manually-run desktop tools to get your job done. Rather that wait for features that aren't there in Salesforce, you can have unlimited power to work with Salesforce as a local database in minutes.

[dcunni]

Thanks for all of your posts and emails. Your feedback is very helpful. The good news is that we are seeking to address many of these feature requests over the next couple of releases. We have also seen partners develop some powerful analytical tools to enable some of these capabilities. Stay tuned for more to come on the AppExchange over the next few months!

On that note, I'm interested in hearing about how you plan to use Salesforce with any existing BI tools you may have in house (not including Excel).  I would also like to encourage you to share any best practices or workarounds that you've implemented to get around some of these issues today.

Thanks,

Darren

[GMP]

Hallo Darren,
welcome here and my best wish for your work.

Some major "problems" are already mentioned. From my perspective one big point I miss is the chance to customize reports in a more grafical manner. You should not only be able to have rows and lines. You should be able to design the report free, place the fields on a "sheet of paper" whereever you want. It's a bit more like only reporting, but with this you expand the capabilities of SF in the right direction.

We use for us and our customers, yes we are a partner of salesforce, allways Jasper Reports to design special reports which aren't be able to run directly from SF. I.E. we place in this case a hyperlink which then extract the necessary information into a local database, mostly mySQL, call the app. report at the jasper server, run the report and show it to the user in his SF enironment. If we could handle this in the future in SF - great.

We use this structure also to generate shipping papers, invoices, travel reports etc. -

Please feel free to conatct me if there is a need for more information about o ur way of dealing with these things.

Best regards

Gerhard Mack
CEO
GMP - Service KG
Hamburg, Germany
gmack@gmp-service.com