Recently, I have been engaging new customers and talking to them about the before and after scenario of the ‘Phocas Experience’. It doesn’t matter what industry they are in or what products they sell, the big relief that they talk about is that they no longer have to deal with the constant onslaught of requests for sales reports to answer simple questions.
The never-ending need from data hungry sales reps or inquisitive senior management places the burden on either Finance or IT. These departments are constantly being asked to fetch this or export that into a report so they can answer a simple query. These poor highly intelligent data hero’s are getting exhausted at doing all the grunt work for others to answer simple questions. I say simple because these are truly simple questions like “what was my sales for the southern region accounts last year compared to this year?” “How many customers bought the zinger in the last 3 months?” Or, “what was our gross profit for the doo-dad product category last quarter?”
As I said, these questions are simple. However, getting the answers to these questions requires a bit of spreadsheet gymnastics to get to the point where these answers can be derived from the data out of your ERP system. Often taking at least an hour or so of the finance or IT person’s time. This time is valuable! Not to mention that the bulk of these incoming queries happen at the most busy or inopportune times. Like in month-end for finance or during a new CRM integration. The bottom line is they don’t have time to do someone else’s fact finding.
However, request after request, they grudgingly went forth with all their V-Look Up ability and advanced excel skills fulfilling these requests. All the while thinking GET IT YOURSELF! But the problem is they can’t really. They don’t have access to the ERP system or would even know what to do if they did. If only there was a way that they could get access to the data for any customer or any product - for any time period. If only the sales rep looking after the national accounts could just point and click his own self through the sales history to find his own answers to his own questions.
If only the Managing Director didn’t bother you with a Monday AM request for profit margins from the weekend that just past!
If only I could say…get it yourself…sir. It’s in Phocas :-)
There is a way that you can free yourself from the never-ending requests to do other peoples work. Want to find out how? Take 3 minutes out of your time to watch a simple, easy to use, self-serve data analytics tool that will put you in a position to tell people where to go, on our demo page!
