Cognos Podcasts

Leveraging your ERP Data Series:
Siebel and Cognos, an IBM company

Doug Adams from Cognos explains why many Oracle customers pair up Cognos with their Oracle solutions.

Duration: 4 min 51 sec

This the last episode in the five part "Leveraging Your Data" podcast series from Cognos, an IBM company.

Summary
Join James MaCuaig & Doug Adams for 6 minutes on the benefits of BI insights into your Siebel CRM data. Learn the top three areas of value, hear how one auto maker drove sales, and look at fast, self serve reporting, analysis, and more for Siebel users. Episode 5 of 5 in the Leveraging Your Data series.

Description

Siebel customers are reaping the benefits of leveraging their CRM investments with the help of Cognos business intelligence and you are invited to learn how.

Host James MacCuaig interviews Cognos Product Marketing Manager and Siebel user Doug Adams to gain insight into the customer value of the relationship between the two firms. Adams describes three main areas of value that customers experience by extending their Siebel applications with business intelligence. They gain better understanding of their sales opportunities, obtain closed loop analysis of their marketing efforts, and get superior insight into service requests.

By way of example, Adams points to a Detroit-based auto maker who used Cognos business intelligence on its Siebel data to identify the most attractive options across its various car makes and models. As a result, the firm created option bundles that helped to drive increased sales.

The Cognos software for Siebel applications breaks down into a free data adapter and the IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence report pack for Siebel CRM. The latter goes beyond simple reporting to include analysis, scorecarding, dashboards, business event management and more. Similarly, it contains more than 60 pre built reports based on years of Cognos customer requirements. These reports address the daily challenge of gathering data from various ETL and reporting tools and bring it all together in one environment for reporting on transactional data. As a Siebel user himself, Adams relates his own experience of moving from a three week lead time for Siebel CRM report requests to on demand reports through the self serve nature of Cognos business intelligence capabilities.

MacCuaig learns that three layers of technology contribute to this complete solution: the data adapter leverages the Siebel API or the object/components layer so customers can use their own custom made Siebel functions; the composite information server and metadata layer optimizes queries and query paths for fast responses to user requests; and the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence layer offers the widest variety of business intelligence reporting options.

The discussion concludes with Adams pointing out that since the Oracle acquisition of Siebel, additional customers have been attracted to Cognos’ ability to combine heterogeneous data sources into a single version of the truth. This is particularly true when organizations wish to combine their Siebel CRM data with information from their financial systems for a complete picture of organizational health.