Varicent announced a new major release of their application – Varicent SPM 6.0 – at their user conference on Monday. The new features of this release include a new module called Presenter (a tool to build interactive sales reports), Model Manager (a tool to facilitate the management of multiple compensation models / lines of business), and CRM Integration (providing the ability to embed Varicent SPM into Microsoft Dynamics CRM). I spent the past 3 days training on this new release of Varicent SPM, and in particular on the Presenter module which I will review now.
Presenter allows to create and configure custom reports, and to publish them to the web. In the past, Varicent users had to use the “Web Forms” module to create similar reports, but web forms are more complex to build, and lack key features such as the ability to embed graphs. This new module is supposed to empower business users to design their own reports, directly from within the Varicent SPM application.
Reports consist of 4 key components storing data:
- Calculations
- Parameters (restrictions on the results being displayed)
- Scalars (variable returning single value)
- Sources (where the information is coming from)
As well as other building blocks: Images, Text, Controls, Scalars, Fixed Grid, Data Grids and Charts. Creating a report only consists of adding these elements to the empty report page.
The positioning of the objects on the report is fairly straightforward and consists of creating tables and inserting the objects in their own cell. In order to position everything perfectly, tables can be embedded into each other (a new table created within the cell of another table), etc. The positioning of the objects can be fine tuned by adjusting the cell’s alignment settings, borders and cell spacing. In other words, positioning objects in Presenter’s reports feels exactly like designing a web page a few years ago before CSS became a standard.
Presenter also includes many other formatting features which should be familiar from Excel. For example, borders and cell shading can be adjusted in a very similar way, and it is even easy to setup some conditional formatting (such as a cell being highlighted in yellow if a commission is over a certain amount). Reports can also include links to other reports which allows to “drill down” on specific results. Presenter reports can be made very “dynamic” by including dropdown menus (called pick lists by Varicent) to filter results for certain people, product lines, etc.
Once the objects are inserted into the report, clicking on the “Preview” tab shows how the report would look like on the web once it is published, using actual calculation results.
So can “business users” really create their own reports? Presenter seems to be much easier to use than other BI/reporting applications such as Actuate and Business Objects and does not require any reporting experience. Furthermore, simple reports can be created fairly rapidly. This being said, the ‘complexity’ lies in figuring out which sources or calculations need to be used, and also to be able to create these objects when required. For someone with Varicent implementation experience, the learning curve should be very quick.
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