Oracle CRM On Demand Exposed -
Business Intelligence

Oracle CRM On Demand has finally made significant improvements in business intelligence capabilities. For several years, the primary focus was on building out the core functionality to be competitive in the market, and it’s only been recent that the reports have caught up. Since Oracle’s core business is in ERP systems one could assume that the customer has an IT team that can develop code and customize applications, including the development of reports. When Oracle pushed to take to their On Demand product to market, the same assumption remained; which is that IT staff could develop reports when they were needed. For most On Demand customers, that assumption does not hold true which leaves users with no good way to get data out of the system.

Free: Complete Report – Oracle CRM On Demand Exposed

Now Oracle CRM On Demand offers a library of standard reports, dashboards, and a custom report writer. It appears there has been an emphasis placed on using dashboards as a reporting tool since Oracle CRM On Demand allows for liberal use of dashboards throughout the system. In order for a dashboard to properly display data, it must first have a report tied to it that will feed the dashboard information. Therefore, if you need 30 dashboards, plan on creating 30 reports to feed the information. We suspect this is how Oracle has addressed a deficiency in the security of the On Demand CRM reports. The existing reports are adequate starting points for most data needs while the report writer tool also allows you to create reports from standard data fields.

Custom reporting is not so straightforward. Our customer interviews have produced a wide range of workarounds ranging from the complex creation of entirely separate reporting databases that included hard coded reports written by IT staff to the rudimentary export of raw data to Excel for further formatting, manipulation and graphing. Be sure to double check the alignment of your reporting requirements and the standard reporting feature set since there is a cost to have custom reports written when your needs are more complex.

Free: Complete Report – Oracle CRM On Demand Exposed