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CRM user adoption information made easy: Siebel Usage Accelerator!
Author:
Gianluca Nacci
Introduction
One of the main issues that companies deal with in most CRM implementations is user adoption. Retrieving information about system usage is often difficult and cumbersome. How can a manager know if his subordinates enter the right information in right places, and even if they use the system at all? If you are a business analyst or a team manager and your CRM tool choice is Siebel, then Usage Accelerator is the answer.
Usage Accelerator is a useful Siebel Analytics module that is organised in six Intelligence Dashboards: Action Plan, Completeness, Coverage, Opportunity Updates, Scorecard and User Adoption. Let’s have a quick review of each of them.
The Action Plan dashboard contains a set of reports focused on data quality in entities such as Accounts and Contacts, highlighting the number of Account or Contact records that are still incomplete or needing coverage - by team or by organisation. It is also a useful tool to understand which customer needs immediate action (make phone calls, sending mails, update addresses and so on).
Fig.1 – User Adoption dashboard, Active Users page
The Completeness dashboard goes into further detail, this dashboard reports those entities which have the most incomplete fields. It will show you the incomplete Accounts/Contacts, the general completeness trend, etc. If you want to have an easy glance at the data quality of your CRM data, this is for you.
The Coverage dashboard highlights trends and numbers about Accounts and Contacts that need new Activities, Accounts needing new Contacts and so on. It is the ideal complement to the Action Plan dashboard, offering a decision support in order to act on your relevant customers.
Fig.2 – Account Plan dashboard, Account Coverage report
The fourth dashboard, called Opportunity Updates, tracks opportunities whose current close date have not been updated in the last 90 days. Furthermore, it highlights opportunities needing an update by deal size, sales stage, probability and manager. It is a good insight into your or your teams' opportunity data quality.
The Scorecard dashboard is split by individual, team and organisation pages. It tracks Siebel usage in terms of last logins, average login frequency and synchronisation frequency, allowing you to understand if your team is using Siebel and how often, enabling the enforcement of best practices and business rules.
Fig 3 – Action Plan dashboard, Contact Completeness report
The User Adoption dashboard contains an Active Users page, highlighting the most and last active teams and the trends in terms of login and synchronisation. The second page, Application Usage, reports the trend and average records that were created or updated. The whole dashboard is therefore a useful cockpit offering information on the overall usage of the Siebel CRM system.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, Usage Accelerator is an out-of-the-box powerful set of reports which allows CRM managers and business analysts to have all important data about Siebel usage available with just a few clicks. If you are looking for an integrated solution and easy to implement – it comes out of the box with Siebel Business Analytics – that can help you track how your employees use Siebel CRM, and give you a hint of the data quality of your relevant customers, then this tool is definitely what you are looking for. Check it out!
Fig 4 – Opportunity Updates dashboard and report
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Security in Siebel Analytics – an update from the Experts
Configuring database authentication in Siebel Analytics’ integrated solution
Author: Víctor Castellá
Introduction
Siebel Analytics (SA) allows basically three alternatives to configure user authentication to access the SA Web application. This article will highlight the different options and demonstrate one of the methods – database validation.
The first alternative: Manual User creation
With this option the administrator manually creates all users that are going to access the SA Web application. This is only recommended when there are very few users due to the large amount of maintenance this requires.
The second alternative: LDAP
This more frequently used option requires creating a connection to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). This is the best solution for companies who are already using this security solution for their enterprise applications. All rules, security restrictions, etc, are defined in a centralized repository and available for applications to apply security restrictions. In the last eZine, Moïse Kameni explained how to do this step by step. (click here to read this article).
The third alternative: Database Authentication
The third option to configure the user’s authentication is based on validating the users against a database. This can be the Siebel database where Siebel users have already been setup, or another database in which the users’ credentials (login and password) to access to SA Web application are maintained.
Let’s see step by step how to set up this database authentication from SA against the Siebel database.
The first important thing to take into account is the hierarchy of users who need to be created for SA. SA establishes a one-to-one relationship between groups from SA and responsibilities in Siebel. It is therefore necessary to manually create groups in the repository of SA, matching the relevant responsibilities maintained within Siebel. As a next step we will define the rights at group level in the SA repository.
Once the groups are created in the SA repository and the rights to access data and/or objects have been defined, the connection between the repository and the Siebel database needs to be configured.
1. Edit the file NQSConfig.ini (allocated in x:\Siebel Analytics\Conf) and scroll down to the security section. Then uncomment the lines of database authentication as demonstrated below image.
The first line specifies the type of authentication we are going to use. The third one specifies the database connection that will be needed.
2. This connection has to be defined in the repository.
The standard repository of SA has this database connection already defined. To create a new database connection you have to create a data source pointing to Siebel OLTP and create the connection in the repository as follows:
Right click in the physical layer and select New Database. Type a name and select the driver to connect to the database.
Select the Connection Pools tab and click on the Add button. Type a name for the connection pool and the data source name. The user name and password have to be: USER and PASSWORD because these are the names of the variables that get the credentials from the SA web application when the user logs in. Click the OK button.
Click the OK button.
3. The next step is to check (or create in case you are not working with the standard repository) the initialization block that initiates the authentication through the database connection created previously.
Go to Manage -> Variables. When the Variable Manager appears, select Initialization Blocks in the left panel.
If you are working with the standard repository just select Authentication initialization block and double click WHAT.
In case you are not in the standard repository you will need to create the initialization block. To do this, right click in the right panel and select the New Initialization Block option. Fill in the necessary parameters as demonstrated in the previous image. The initialization block has to be associated with the session variables. For the query you can use the TBO variable or directly enter the name of the Siebel database. Click the Browse button and select the connection pool previously created.
To check that the initialization block works correctly, click the Test button.
Modify the USER variable and type a user that exists in the Siebel database. Click the Ok button.
Save the repository and load it to the SA server. Check if it is possible to log on with any user of the Siebel database. If this works properly, congratulations you have successfully set up your user authentication.
The next step is to configure security in the SA web application: create new groups, establish the rights to access dashboards, subject areas, columns, and so on.
Conclusion
We have seen three different alternatives to configure the users’ authentication in SA. Which authentication option you choose for your implementation will largely depend on your final requirements and existing infrastructure. If SA is going to have a few users or SA is working as a stand-alone version, the best option is creating the users manually on the repository or connecting the repository against LDAP where the users are already defined. If this is not the case and SA is going to have a lot of users and there is a Siebel environment already working, the database authentication mode can be the most efficient solution. It reduces the cost of maintenance, the possibility to enhance the number of the users easily, and applying the same security hierarchy from Siebel to SA.
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