This is why we built PS Cloud Core Analytics
This article is written by Joe Thomas, Solutions Evangelist Certinia. His goal is to help organizations understand the “how and why” cloud-based technology can help them run a most intelligent, agile, and connected business. Get his insights here on our Professional Services (PS) Cloud Core analytics and putting it into practice at your services organization.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of interest in our PS Cloud Core Analytics from our existing customers, most likely due to the great job Ciara Gomez is doing with our Success Byte series. (Click here for the Success Byte page on Certinia Communities and here for the specific Success Byte on PS Cloud Core Analytics.)
I realized that while I spent most of my time in the Success Byte explaining WHAT PS Cloud Core Analytics is and did, I didn’t explain WHY we created it. Hopefully, this blog post will answer that Why question! (if not, feel free to blast me in email!)
Why did we create PS Cloud Core Analytics?
The short and easy answer is “Because you told us to do it!” We may have changed our name recently, but one thing that will never change is our commitment to customer centricity. It’s at the heart of our products, helping you learn more and better serve your customers. And it’s at the heart of our culture. We actively solicit your ideas and feedback and incorporate it into our products, both from a functionality and licensing perspective. Dan Brown, our head of product, does a great job of showcasing how many new features in each release come directly from your ideas, and I’m proud to say that our Analytics team tends to lead in translating direct customer feedback and requests into delivered dashboards. Cash Flow Forecasting, Service Revenue Forecasting, As-of-Aging, Scheduling Risk, and Capacity and Demand by Skill/Role are just some of the dashboards we’ve built based on direct customer requests. The Project Reporting Dataset would be another great example of product capability built directly from customer idea submission.
We built PS Cloud Core Analytics based directly on feedback from many of our customers, in this case, primarily our enterprise customers. For us, that included customers with 500+ individual consultants, some with over 1000, and some recent customers with over 10,000 consultants and subcontractors. What they told us is that they wanted the power and visibility of our Advanced Services Analytics for individual contributors, without the cost and overhead that made sense for the Services Operations team, Project Managers with portfolios of projects, and Practice Managers that lead those large groups. In many cases, those individual contributors were being managed and compensated on the metrics being visualized within our Advanced Services Analytics, and the desire to see those metrics at a personal level in near real-time was critical.
Your desire to have everyone on the same page, from your CEO to that key consultant living in Fargo, North Dakota, Penrith, UK, or Alice Springs, Australia, is what drove us to build PS Cloud Core Analytics. Salesforce’s offering of a limited-use “freemium” version of CRM Analytics (the engine behind all our analytic offerings) is how we can offer it to you as part of Certinia Foundations. We chose the use cases you told us were most important for your individual contributors, utilization, service revenue forecasting, and project financial health, and made sure those metrics were both visible to the individuals and rolled up nicely into our Advanced Analytics dashboards in use by management and operations. PS Cloud Core Analytics is a COMPLEMENT to our Advanced Service Analytics, not a replacement. It has limited value to customers of any size without an existing implementation of our Advanced Analytics because of the constraints set by the limited-use license we leverage from Salesforce. Key features in our Advanced Analytics, such as the ability to alter/change/blend dashboards, create new dashboards, add new filters, leverage custom objects and fields, or even the ability to download to Excel or access the Analytics Studio are not technically possible with PS Cloud Core Analytics, which is why we see the two products working in conjunction.
Hopefully, you now understand the “Why?” behind our PS Cloud Core Analytics offering. Did this make sense? Ping me at [email protected] if it didn’t, or if you are interested in learning more about what we are doing with Analytics and AI going forward. I’m always happy to learn what you are thinking about doing with Analytics and Certinia!
