RFM Analysis

RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis is used by marketing to determine their campaign targets. It is based on three metrics from the previous sales records:

13 Period Calendar

I will discuss the following topics:

• What is the 13 period calendar?
• Who uses the 13 period calendar?
• How is it different from the 4-4-5 calendar?

Customer Dimension and CRM related Analytics

Why is the customer dimension so important?

• A well-maintained, well-deployed conforming customer dimension is the cornerstone of sound customer centric analysis

What are special characteristics of the customer dimension?

• Customer dimension is extremely deep. It may have million rows.
• Customer dimension is extremely wide. It has hundreds of attributes.
• Customer dimension changes often. It is not really a slowly changing dimension. It is sometimes called as rapidly changing monster dimension.
• Keeping the historical images of the customer data is important.
• The data in the customer dimension come from multiple sources. Matching, de-dup, standardization among different sources is critical for successfully conforming the dimension.
• The customer dimension with data may be enriched from the external data.
• Customer data is the source for other dimensions – geography, industry, lines of business, etc.
• You have to comply with the privacy regulation.
• The data from external source may be only licensed for a period of time. The external data need to be associated with your own internal data for analysis for special purposes and the data need to be removed from your database.
• The customer dimension itself is actually a source of fact tables. For example, # of customer living in California with the breakdown by age groups.

Backlog analysis

Backlog refers to unfinished work or to customer orders that have been received but are either incomplete or in the process of completion. Backlog orders are also known as Open Orders.

Backlog analysis lets you to investigate the potential revenue by reporting all the work that have been received but not yet fulfilled. If you assume that you can fulfill all the remaining work in your backlog, you can predict how much revenue you will generate over the remaining period.

Up-sell and Cross-Sell

Up-sell and cross-sell are important for your business due to the increasing competitions and market volatility. You need to maximize your customer value by selling more to your existing customers. Up-sell and cross-sell are key drivers of deploying a business intelligence analytical application, which can help you identify new source of revenues.

Up-Sell and Cross-sell are defined as below:

Bookings Analysis

Bookings Analysis is to help managers to manage the demand. Although the data may come from Order Management, Contract Administration, or Project Accounting systems, the primary interest in the booking analysis is from sales and marketing perspectives.

The analytics application should provide the bookings analysis to help demand managers understand the pattern of booked orders or work and the future revenue trends for the business, enabling the evaulation of current status against the expecation and the actions to increase sales, the deal size, volume of future pipeline.

Booking can be measured by quantities or dollars.

Book to Bill Ratio

Book to Bill ratio is the ratio of orders booked for future delivery to orders being shiped immediately, and therefore billed.

Sales Performance Report in SAP

I studied a sales performance reports found in SAP Sales Information System.

This report analyzes the monthly sales performance of a number of sales reporting structure.

Typical Business Intelligence Applications

This arcticles examines the major business drivers of business intelligence and the typical business intelligence applications. Some BI applications are common for all types of enterprise, others are specific to some industries.

• Marketing Intelligence
• Sales Intelligence
• Customer Intelligence
• Service Intelligence
• Financial Intelligence
• Project Intelligence
• Procurement Intelligence
• Human Resource Intelligence