The document compares the reporting and analytics capabilities of CRM OnDemand and Salesforce.com. It summarizes feedback from Salesforce.com customers highlighting limitations of Salesforce's reporting including lack of dynamic dashboard filtering, inability to join more than 3 tables, lack of pivot tables and drillability. It also notes Salesforce's inability to perform exception, negative and change-over-time reporting without data exports. Finally it contrasts Salesforce's basic dashboards with Oracle's more full-featured and customizable enterprise-grade dashboards.

1. CRM OnDemand vs Salesforce.com Reporting and Analytics Comparison

2. Dynamic Dashboard Filtering “ we have now literally hundreds of reports and about 50 dashboards due to this lack of functionality for a user to see in the common dashboard only his information. this of course means tons of administrative work with reports.” Commentary *Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” A single dashboard can easily be built that displays data specific to the user who is currently viewing it. Administrators cannot create a single dashboard that will show data specific to the user viewing it. Many reports, such as performance against goals or territory analysis, require that data be filtered based on the user who is viewing the report. With salesforce’s reports, administrators must create a report and clone it for each user. This makes making changes to these reports extremely labor intensive. In addition, SFDC administrators may not make changes to a user’s account without logging in with their credentials, further belaboring the process.

3. “ I want to see MY performance against quota”

4. Joining Multiple Tables “… we have been told that we should purchase some other expensive reporting package, that links with salesforce, in order to run this and other reports. I just don't see this as an answer either. Why should I have to purchase another package for something Salesforce should be able to accomplish[?]” Commentary *Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” Oracle’s reporting allows for easy combination of multiple tables. Reports can only join 3 tables; a “parent” and 2 “children”. For example, a report that shows Account, Contact, Open Opportunities, and Tasks would not be possible without joining multiple tables. Creating a 360 degree view of the customer will be very difficult without the ability to combine data from various tables within the application. This would require export of data with salesforce.

5. “ Give me a 360 degree view of my business”

6. Pivot Table Reports “ I personally spend a lot of time taking data out of salesforce only to create a pivot table with the data due to the limited reporting functionality on the existing dashboards.” Commentary *Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” Oracle offers Pivot Tables which let you view data in the optimal presentation. There is no Pivot Table functionality in salesforce.com. Pivot Tables have are a widely used and understood mechanism for simplifying complex data sets, and presenting. Pivot Tables are used in reports such as “waterfall” reports, forecast vs. actual, and territory analysis; and are typically the most widely used report type for Oracle users. Pivot tables are also helpful in report administration, allowing the creation of a single report that presents data many ways. Without Pivot Tables, most report producers export data from the system and use a separate tool for reporting.

7. “ Segment and organize my data without exporting and using another tool”

8. Report Drillability “ [I would like to be able to] Click on a dashboard chart element to drill to report detail. This will save time and enhance user experience by drilling down directly to the detail instead of having to click on the dashboard component and then filtering on the specific grouping.” Commentary *Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” Any report value may be a hyperlink to anywhere, including other reports, records in the CRM system, or external URLs; to any number of levels. Can also drill into multiple locations from a link. Reports are static, and do not include the ability to drill deeper and easily access deeper data. Cannot link to the record in the report. A key to user adoption in any application is ease of use an navigation. When viewing a report, users often need more information and want to go deeper to the source of the data, which allows them to gain better insight into their business. Without drillability, reporting will be cumbersome, and user adoption will be significantly diminished.

9. “ Give me real insight without a lot of clicks”

10. Exception Reporting “ The Holy Grail of Salesforce! If this came about I could *almost* kiss your developers. I spend roughly 40 hours a month exporting data into Excel files so that I perform joins for major reports (e.g., follow-up on cases using "Log A Call" and "Emails", and what the frequency of those responses are).“ Commentary *Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” Oracle includes exception reporting. Salesforce does not allow exception reporting. Exception reporting allows one to identify reported results that deviate from expected results. It allows one to find performance metrics that fall outside of acceptable metrics, or find sets of data that do not contain a data type. Without exception reporting, your administrator will have to export data to third party reporting tools. Example: Red flag when a rep is taking 15 days average to close their service requests, when the SLA is 12 days.

11. Help me understand when something’s going wrong

12. Negative Reporting “ [I Tried] to see if I could formulate a report to view open opportunities without open activities. I could not; it pulled up opportunities that did not have any activity history. However, any new opportunities that had a pending activity but no history yet, were included in the report. There have been several ideas on this in the past and I am surprised that Salesforce has not found a way to implement exception reporting such as this. I am still having to export to separate reports and run scripts in FileMaker Pro in order to run the report I need.” Commentary *Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” Oracle offers negative reporting. Salesforce does not allow negative reporting. Negative reporting is a type of exception reporting. A typical scenario involves running a report on “contacts with no activities scheduled”, “accounts with no opportunities”, or “opportunities without products”.

13. I want to see Accounts and Opportunity data – even if there are no Opportunities for an Account Without “negative” reporting. With “negative” reporting, data is exposed.

14. Data Warehouse “ Hear, hear! It's a nonsense that I can't deliver change-over-time reports on the opportunity pipeline. “ Commentary Quote from Salesforce.com Customer *All quotes from salesforce.com customers taken from the salesforce.com “idea exchange” Oracle stores data in a traditional data warehouse, where it is optimized for reporting and analytics. Salesforce.com stores data in a transactional reporting system. The only way to trend is to create multiple reports and “snapshot” them. Oracle offers a traditional OLAP data warehouse, aggregating data it into a multidimensional warehouse. SFDC can take a snapshot of a report, which means you must predict accurately your reporting needs, and update reports when you add new fields or objects. Oracle holds your data at the ready for historical analysis wihtout any intervention. Finally, performance and storage will be an issue for SFDC, as they are purposing a transactional database as a data warehouse.

15. Historic trending available on demand

17. Tabbed dashboard Custom Chart Colors Drag and Drop Designer Simple interface plus powerful, feature-rich dashboards equal increased user adoption