Dashboards and Charts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

My role has been to look at both Dynamics CRM and Business Intelligence and I love the power of Charts and Dashboards within Dynamics CRM. The ability to quickly visualize data has always been a great feature for me.  Below is a quick overview of dashboards and charts within Dynamics CRM 2013 and some out of the box ones available.

I am going to walk through these dashboards and the features I like most. As anyone who has trialled Dynamics CRM online will know, the first thing the user sees is a dashboard – showing a number of charts and tasks.

This dashboard shows the CRM overview but users can select a number of predefined dashboards using the dropdown menu above the “Sales Pipeline” chart. Users can choose a range of standard dashboard out of the box including:

• Customer Service Operations
• Customer Service Performance
• Customer Service Representative
• Marketing
• Marketing Social
• Sales Activity
• Sales Performance
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Overview
• Opportunities Advanced Heatmap

Custom dashboards can also be created by the user so they can see data that is relevant to their day to day needs.

One of the fantastic features of these dash boards is the ability to drill down into the information to  look at the data in more detail. The idea between dashboards are to give a snapshot of what is happening, if there is something that needs attention, users should be able to get directly to that information and start making business decisions. Dynamics CRM allows the user to click and drill down on any field within the record and display this data in a different format. The picture below will explain better:

The first image shows the sales pipeline funnel found on the main dashboard.  By selecting the pipeline phase Closing the user can drill down and look at all the “Potential Customers” that are in it. I have decided to represent this data in a column chart and the results can be seen on the right. This shows the user that within the Closing phase in the sales pipeline there are two opportunities, one valued at £10,000 and a second at £26,000. This allows the user to see that they should be focusing on the Blue Company’s opportunity as it will bring in a larger revenue. There is quick access to the sales opportunity records that are behind this chart and allows quick access to the underlying data.

New dashboards can be created using the Dashboard Ribbon and give the user the ability add charts (eg funnels, bar charts, columns, line or pie) lists from CRM (e.g. opportunities, accounts, to do tasks etc), Iframes (this shows a web page and could point towards a search engine or a company website/intranet) or a web resource (this could be an application built using Microsoft Silverlight).

Each item can be placed wherever the user wants and expanded to fit the whole area – the dashboards are very flexible and I would recommend users create one and use the Dashboard Ribbon to see how easy it is to get the information they want in an easy to view layout.

Charts can also be used throughout the Dynamics CRM; an example of this is viewing the opportunities as shown below:

The user can view all opportunities; on the right they can select a number of available charts. The chart above shows all opportunites split by rep and by the % probability of it closing – these are measured by the Estimated Revenue. The default shows the top customers and the estimated revenue from these customers. Some of the default charts available are:

• Actual Revenue by fiscal period
• Actual Revenue by month
• Deals won vs Deals lost
• Deals won vs Deals lost by fiscal period
• Deals won vs Deals lost by owner
• Estimated vs Actual Revenue (by fiscal)
• Estimated vs Actual Revenue (by month)
• Opportunity by campaigns
• Revenue generated by campaign
• Sales leaderboard
• Sales pipeline
• Sales progress by territory
• Top Opportunities

As you can see there are a large number of charts out of the box with Dynamics CRM and new ones can be created.

A possible scenario:

A salesperson is coming up to the end of a month; they are behind on their revenue target and want to close the opportunities with the highest value to make the target. They open all their opportunities like shown in the image above. They can see they have 9 opportunities but want to target one with high revenue potential. They can see by the chart that the Variety Store (bottom bar in bar chart) has an estimated revenue of £180,000 compared with the other customers who have considerably smaller estimated revenues.

The user selects this customer on the chart and filters the £180,000 by Probability. Dynamics CRM then changes the view to represent the new data as shown below:

The user can easily see that there are two opportunities, one at £150,000 and one at £10,000.  They can also see that the probability of closing the larger opportunity is much greater (75% rather than 10%).  The user can now go directly into the sales opportunity and close the business; hopefully bringing in £150,000 revenue and meeting his target.

Conclusion

I just wanted to highlight a few areas around dashboards and charts and this will hopefully give you some ideas to look at when working with the Dynamics CRM 2013 trial.  I think this is one of the greatest advancements in this latest release and it lets the user get a quick snapshot of the data stored BUT allows them to get to the information behind the charts quickly…meaning more productivity and working more effectively.

If you have any questions around the dashboards or want a demo set up/talked through just send me an email rdunlop@sysco-software.com.

 

by Richard Dunlop