Business Health Summarized In Your Browser
Imagine getting your KPIs this way:
You go to a browser page, hit refresh, and see this week’s highest margin items, your top 10 customers by salesperson, and a list of open sales opportunities from CRM. Delivering business health data to a webpage is what we call a webcast. Webcasts are one of the easiest ways to get report data on the fly because they don’t need a special piece of software in order to work. For example, bookmark a URL or add it to your homepage list, and the webcast is always there for you as a “location” for the summary data. Anyone with the URL can see the information. The URL can be within your network’s firewall (meaning not on the public internet) or it can be published to a password-protected internet page using HTTPS. That option would be useful if people in the field wanted to bookmark the URL on their mobile device for regular refreshing.
Ok, what counts as business health?
Webcasts are useful for viewing summarized data that doesn’t need to be manipulated. It’s really best for view-only information. Unlike an Info Explorer cube that is designed so you can drag and drop dimensions, webcasts are meant to present data in a final, summarized form. Webcasts target people who want to see a snapshot of information but aren’t necessarily technical power users. They just need to see the bottom line.
Examples of business health webcasts could be:
A list of items with the highest margin that have sold year-to-date
A list of today’s top sales orders
A summary of total sales today from our top 10 customers
An end-of-day report of top item sales and margins, month-to-date
A list of overdue invoices at the end of the day
The number of CRM Cases created by account manager
The number of communication activities logged in CRM by salesperson
Well, my main KPI is how much food is within a 10 yard radius.
How does it work?
Webcasts use SQL queries to pull data from your database. Then the results of those queries are formatted with HTML, and the results create an HTML file. That HTML file can be opened with a browser right from its publishing location, or accessed on the internet with proper security. These webcast KPIs can be “triggered” to refresh on a schedule (say, once a day at 4:00pm). When the webcast is triggered, the page will show the most current data when refreshed.
How do I get it?
Webcasts are one of the alert delivery tools that are part of Sage Alerts & Workflow, developed by Vineyardsoft Knowledge Sync. If you currently use KnowledgeSync to deliver invoices and order confirmations, you are using one of its most popular features. Webcast functionality is included with the package, so there is no additional module that you need to purchase.