IBM - Business Intelligence Solution – New Version
Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business Intelligence Solution – New Version
Nomination Title: IBM Sales Dashboard – Prescriptive Analytics for Sales
Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words
With advances in technology, Sales Leaders understand that in order to be competitive, they must have access to tools that are easy to use and predictive analysis easy to understand.
The IBM Sales Management Support team was faced with a challenge: how to effectively equip our Sales Leaders and analyst with the right tools and information to win revenue for the company. The objective was to provide a single online platform, providing real time data integrated from various sources. A tool with insights and connections that could compute vast amounts of data and provide meaningful real time visual insights, that enhanced forecasting and decision making. The solution: IBM Sales Dashboard (ISD).
The ISD was built using the latest IBM approved open source technologies on IBM Blue Stack and hosted on IBM Public Cloud. Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) models allowed for easy dashboard experience. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services were used to provide security, scalability and high availability, thus attempting a never thought solution in Sales Analytics.
Based on this strong foundation, ISD is enabled with advanced sales analytics using artificial intelligence and machine learning, which when made effective by strong visualization, triggers the right course of actions, producing positive results. It promptly illuminates what is working and what isn’t working, where the opportunities are and which of those opportunities must be prioritized. It evolves continually, thereby improving accuracy based on new information, outcomes, and actions.
Key features of the ISD:
Executive Summary View: Provides a synopsis of the business from the sales leader’s perspective.
KPIs: Visible throughout the application and are updated based on the selected filters, providing instant data comparison and performance evaluation.
Drill up/down: Allows the user to delve deeper into the data to get to the details
Deal Lists: In addition to summary views, the deal list section can be grouped in more than 50 ways helping the sales leader to isolate the areas that need immediate attention and track sales progression.
Analytical Insights: Insights from various in-built analytical tools like “Win probability”, “Prescriptive seller insights (Sales Action Quadrants)” help in slicing filtered data.
Historical Trends: Past performance available with 4 quarters of historical data analysis, serving as a source for making context-based decisions, when compared with Real time CRM Roadmap analysis.
Benefits include:
Cost Savings: Elimination of 400 reports, resulting in considerable annual cost savings of approximately $1M to IBM.
Performance: Processing more than 600 GB data (fetching +50,000 records) within 3 seconds. Supports 5,000 concurrent users without any data latency.
Productivity: Enabled the sales analysts to focus more on the sales analysis part rather than spending their time on providing the data to the sales leaders, at an estimate of 30% of analyst’s time.
Data Security: The data security between layers has been ensured using JWT authentication; JSON string generated plays the role of handshake between layers.
Usage statistics: IBM Sales Dashboard already onboarded 2000 users and has become an integral part of their day to day activities.
Reusability: Idea of reusability was always kept in mind which managed us to build the services globally assuring the reusability.
Easy Adoptability: Features like Multi-Profile, Filtration of data, State Retention, Drill through, Drill-up/down to lower granularities has modalized the tool to be self-serve which in-turn allows users to get immediate answers, allowing for proactive action and decisions. 900 filter combinations, 40 views with easy drill down options make it a powerful source of data visualization and analysis.
First in the list: IBM Sales Dashboard was among the first solutions to be launched in IBM Public Cloud with Elastic Search.
ISD is an end-end solution involving the infrastructure setup, architecture design, data analysis & technical design to achieve the requirements. Offered solution is meeting IBM Sales expectations and is highly valued through its uniqueness.