Maximize Your Investment Empowering CRM Users with Knowledge - A Noetix Case Study

In accordance with your overall KM strategy, your organization has decided to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. After a thorough vendor analysis, Siebel is chosen as the best solution to meet your organization's demanding business requirements.

One main objective is to provide operational reporting for users and executives that doesn't drain IT resources. Instead of spending days compiling information manually (or worse, never being able to answer the question at all), with the implementation of Siebel, you imagined users being able to answer almost any CRM-related question the moment it is asked.

Now, six months after your go-live date, end users and executives are still struggling to answer daily business questions as you continue to search for a solution to better empower them.

Sound familiar? You're not alone. Most companies find that empowering users is one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome for a successful implementation. Accessing meaningful, relevant, critical data is far more difficult than anyone expected. The reality is that these powerful and complex enterprise applications, intended to help you better manage your daily business, require reporting tools to maximize your return on investment.

Operational Reporting in the Real World

Leading industry analysts and scores of satisfied customers consistently rate Siebel at the top of the CRM market. However, Siebel's data model makes it difficult for non-technical users to identify all of the information stored in the application. Often, customers have data that is inaccessible to business users. As a result, IT departments are forced to act as information gatekeepers, incurring enormous expense to solve the problem. Siebel has attempted to bridge this gap in their CRM applications by including a set of pre-built reports that provide a fixed view into the data. But fixed-view reports often lack the detail needed to fully understand a business issue, making it difficult to form decisions without all the relevant information.

Noetix addresses this problem by providing customizable reporting for Siebel, automatically generating metadata from enterprise applications and enabling immediate access to data. Generating thousands of business views and pre-built reports that match your unique Siebel configuration (including security, metadata and business rules), the Noetix approach shields reports from application upgrades and reconfigurations, providing users with uninterrupted operational reporting and reducing the expense of report maintenance.

Without such help, reporting from Siebel requires developers with an in-depth understanding of the underlying table structures to access data, using difficult-to-use tools that have been designed for technical users. Siebel business users can now access the data they need in the same context and terminology as their Siebel screens right out-of-the-box, thus eliminating the heavy reliance upon IT resources.

The Noetix Solution for Siebel

NoetixViews®—The Driving Force Behind Noetix

NoetixViews unlocks the operational data within the Siebel CRM applications by automatically translating Siebel user screens into easy-to-use virtual tables using the field names familiar to end users.

Noetix AnswerPoint—Immediate Answers to User Questions

Noetix AnswerPoint provides end users with immediate answers to the most common business questions. This component delivers a comprehensive library of customizable report templates for Siebel CRM, automatically customized to each application's unique configuration.

Noetix QueryServer®—Centralized Data Access

Noetix QueryServer centralizes queries and user management, providing simplified integration between Siebel CRM data and other enterprise data. By integrating disparate data sources into virtual tables, Noetix QueryServer gives query users a simple, single point of access to all enterprise data sources, regardless of where the data resides.

Noetix WebQuery®—Simplified Web-Enabled Access

Noetix WebQuery, a simplified query tool, empowers end users to create and modify reports without IT involvement. Noetix WebQuery easily integrates with enterprise portals and works with popular reporting tools, including Microsoft Excel.

Noetix Benefits:

• Delivers immediate answers to sales, customer service and marketing business questions;

• Empowers business professionals to make informed, data-driven decisions using an ad hoc reporting solution;

• Provides a flexible, Web-based reporting platform for faster, easier Siebel reporting; and

• Allows users to export queries into Microsoft Excel for detailed drilldown and analysis.

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More than 1,200 customers worldwide use Noetix to quickly and cost effectively access the enterprise application data they need to make important business decisions every day. Unlike tools that require weeks of manual mapping to produce a single report, the Noetix solution automatically generates metadata objects specific to an organization's unique configuration of Oracle or Siebel. Using a proprietary auto-discovery process to "crawl" the application database, Noetix transforms data into business content that is searchable and navigable. Noetix dynamically generates meaningful and immediately usable business information that reflects an organization's specific application configuration. Noetix customers include Motorola, Starbucks, Toshiba, VISA and Xerox International Partners. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, WA, with international operations based in London. For more information about Noetix, visit their Web site at Noetix or call toll free at 866-4NOETIX.