ERP, CRM and eCommerce Blog

Companies often have valuable operational and financial data stored in multiple systems and have to create reports by combining this data. For example, a retailer may have customer demographic data such as customer location, gender, employment status and home ownership stored in Dynamics CRM, and sales data stored in ERP such as Dynamics AX or Dynamics GP. The retailer might then want to create a sales analysis report by combining data from both CRM and ERP. In the past, it has been difficult to create PivotTables based on data from different data sources. PowerPivot is a free add-in for Excel 2010 that allows you to easily create PivotTables based on data from disparate systems, websites, spreadsheets, or databases. Using PowerPivot, you can quickly create PivotTables based on up to 100 million rows of data.

After you install PowerPivot, you will see a PowerPivot tab on the Ribbon in Excel. When you click the PowerPivot tab, you see the following buttons.

PowerPivot tab in Excel

Clicking on the PowerPivot Window button opens the PowerPivot window and displays the following options.

Home tab after clicking on PowerPivot Window button

You can now import data from external data sources such as SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel and text files.

In the following example, the company has the customer, customer address and sales data stored in the ERP system. It maintains sales territories in the Dynamics CRM system. It has also created a custom entity in Dynamics CRM to maintain the mapping from State/Province to sales territory. For example, Alaska (AK) is in the Northwest territory and California (CA) is in the Southwest territory.

The company has imported the customer, customer address and sales data from ERP and Territory data and State/Province to Territory mapping from CRM into PowerPivot. It has also created the following relationships:

• Customer Address to State/Province (based on State/Province)
• State/Province to Territory (based on Territory)

PowerPivot enables you to manage relationships between tables in PowerPivot based on common data elements. The following screen shots illustrate this feature.

Relationship between Customer Address and State/Province based on StateProvinceID.

Relationship between State/Province and Territory based on TerritoryID.

Now you are ready to do the analysis by combining data from both sources.

PowerPivot for Excel enables you to analyze Sales by Territory by combining data from ERP and CRM.

In summary, PowerPivot for Excel enables you to create reports based on data residing in multiple systems and tables using the tool you are already familiar with. You can download the PowerPivot for Excel 2010 here.

This post is written by Abi Shende. Abi is a Team Leader in Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Ignify. Ignify is winner of the Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2011 and provides CRM, eCommerce, and ERP software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 5 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine, and ranked as one of 100 most innovative companies in the world in the Red Herring Global 100 in 2011. If you are seeking assistance to maximize your efforts with your CRM project, contact Ignify at 562-219-2001 or email us at crm@ignify.com.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 provides native capability to allow you to export any screen or view into Excel. That export can be a static file with just the data on the screen as a snapshot or as a Dynamic export in the form of an Excel Pivot Table. You have an option to select the fields you want to include in the Pivot Table. Once you have exported the view as a Dynamic Pivot Table, you can then slice and dice the data for further analysis and save the Pivot Table report for future use.

You can open the saved Excel workbook at a later time and refresh it (Data > Refresh from CRM or Refresh All) to update the Pivot Table to reflect the up-to-date information from Dynamics CRM 2011 without having to log into Dynamics CRM. This is incredibly powerful as the report is now on your desktop and every time you open the Excel file, you will have updated numbers.

Here’s an example of a Dynamic report showing the Open Sales Opportunities. The Pivot Table shows open sales opportunities in various pipeline phases by territory. Note the “Refresh from CRM” and “Refresh All” buttons in the Data ribbon. Whenever I want to refresh the data, I would just click the button and my graphs and data will refresh to give me the latest sales pipeline.

The Pivot Table in this Dynamic report shows Open Sales Opportunities in various sales pipeline phases. By clicking the “Refresh from CRM” and “Refresh All” buttons in the Data ribbon, the data and graphs refresh to give the latest sales pipeline.

If you want to make this Pivot Table report available to the other CRM users, you can upload the Excel workbook containing your report to Dynamics CRM. You do this by simply going to the reports area in the workplace and start creation of a new report – specify that it is for an existing file and browse to the location where you saved your Excel workbook and your Excel report containing the Dynamic Pivot Table; it is now available to the other users.

The data displayed in the Pivot Table will depend on the user’s privileges set in CRM. For example, when a user opens the Excel workbook created in the example above (open opportunities by territory), the user viewing this report would see only the opportunities that he or she can otherwise see in CRM.

Dynamic Worksheets and Dynamic Pivot Tables require the use of the Excel add-in which is part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for Microsoft Office Outlook client. You can download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for Microsoft Office Outlook found here.

You can take advantage of Pivot Table reports using the valuable data in CRM, and find the answers to questions like:

1. Which territories performed best and what products are they selling?
2. Which products are selling best over time?
3. What are the top reasons why we lost opportunities?
4. What are the Win and Loss ratios by Lead Source?
5. Which Marketing Campaigns performed well?
6. Who were the top performing Customer Service Representatives (based on case resolution)?

Both a PivotTable report and a PivotChart report enable you to make informed decisions about critical data in your Dynamics CRM system. You can learn how to visualize summary data in a PivotTable report, and to easily see comparisons, patterns, and trends here.

This post is written by Abi Shende. Abi is a Team Leader in Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Ignify. Ignify is winner of the Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2011 and provides CRM, eCommerce and ERP, software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 5 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine and ranked as one of 100 most innovative companies in the world in the Red Herring Global 100 in 2011. If you are seeking assistance to maximize your efforts with your CRM project contact Ignify at 562-219-2001 or email us at crm@ignify.com.