| Reporting/Dashboards |
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We have reached the most visual part of the project. Now that we have a consistent data base and ETL process to reflect all our information in a historical context and a functional set of analytical cubes which permit us to navigate through our date in search of trends, problems or simply, useful information, we can extract this information in different ways for it to be consumed by the interested parties. We have enabled a collection of tools to extract and present information to the user:
We have also enabled a direct access to the production vtiger CRM database to permit reporting directly against this database for those cases in which this is desirable and sufficient to cover the requirements at hand. All of these tools may be mixed together to achieve transmitting information to the users who need it to make decisions. We have also created a few vtiger CRM enhancements on our way to full integration by which we are able to execute reports created with PRD or BIRT directly from the vtiger CRM interface and view the Pentaho User Console inside vtiger CRM:
The downside is that all these tools require knowledge of the database structure, extensive knowledge in many cases, not only of the vtiger CRM database but also of the data warehouse. Although many of the above tools are graphical with an intuitive user interface, other require programming knowledge and all of them require that you be comfortable with the way the data is stored. But don't worry, we are here to help you, you don't need to know this, you need to know how your business is doing. Now that we have all our information in visible and in place, with a set of graphical dashboards to quickly check on the health of our business we can start applying the next logical step: Business Process Management and Statistical Analysis.
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