Hey Sales and Execs: Your IT Guy Has Got a Life Outside of Work

When talking to SME’s (and believe it or not some blue chip companies) about the tools they use to analyze their sales activities and help them make their decisions, the IT guy is the most frequent answer. Why?

To a business owner, a Director or in fact anyone who needs data to manage their activity, searching for business data in a complex ERP is daunting, if not an unproductive use of their time. There are some pre-designed reports but they are often incomplete, cannot be drilled into, or running them will slow the entire company's system down. So they refer to “the IT guy”. “He can generate a report, email it and do the same for every sales executive”. After all, it is all done on a computer and he is the computer expert so he is the person to go to, right?

Wrong. I can only feel the pain of doing this non mission critical task (to him) while other more pressing issues are waiting. Computer breakdowns, compromised firewalls, updates going wrong, phone systems going down are only a few of the challenges he is faced with.

Then at the end of the month, the next sales meeting approaches. Everyone HAS to have the numbers - the entire sales force will descend on headquarters and will be asking for even more data or help. So because all the reports have to be generated during working hours, he finishes his normal working day from home, late at night, before another day hits.

The good news is you can help him live a normal life by using a revolutionary concept: self-service BI. With Phocas, you and your work force can generate all your queries – you can drill, graph, create your dashboards and follow your train of thought while Mr I.T Guy carries out a normal day and goes home happy.

We will need a bit of his help at first, just to have a few extracts in place and to have a routine to update - and depending on your ERP, we might even be able to do it for you. Yes, it is a computer system, but because it is browser-based, it is no different to consulting your daily newspaper online. In fact Phocas is so easy that you can use it during the meetings so you too can start working to live and not live to work.

Now, Mr IT Guy, just because we’ll be saving you some time, please don’t use it to hack my PC…

Are you Mr IT Guy or do you often have to contact IT for your reports?

Either way, see how Phocas can save you time and money by watching our demo video. Just click the button below: