Building Your Own Business Intelligence or Sales Intelligence Tool

In most large companies that need a business intelligence and/or sales intelligence tool, the company pays a site license to SAP, IBM, Oracle, etc.  The IT department then manages the process, with some occasional interaction with the vendor.

But say, for some reason, this is not done at your company.  Perhaps, for whatever reason, the IT department is in disarray, or someone simply refuses to authorize the expense of the site license.  That doesn’t erase the need for a tailored BI/SI tool.  The sales team still needs information, executives need information, etc.  That information needs to be easy to manipulate, and perhaps, for security reasons, access has to be controlled.    Sure, even without a BI/SI tool, the data is still available somewhere in the company’s systems.  But that is cold comfort to some poor soul driving through a snowstorm in Duluth on a way to a meeting who needs information on the customer is about to meet.

These days, though, it is possible for a single person to build a BI/SI tool, and to do it on the cheap.  Step 1 is simply to pull the data, ideally using some automated process.  Step 2 is to manipulate it in some way.  Even fairly sophisticated data clean-up can be automated easily in SQL or even VBA.  Creating specific data sets for each member of the sales team is fairly simple.  In the final step, each of those data sets can be loaded into data visualization software such as Tableau, and a Tableau reader version tailored to each specific team member can be made available through Tableau server or sent via One Note depending on the needs and interests of the organization.  The process can be sufficiently automated to be run regularly – once a week, once a day, etc. 

Frankly, having gone through the process, if I were to do it again, I think I’d look more closely at PowerBI as opposed to Tableau. This is in part because the tools I have available to me are mostly Microsoft products. Unlike Tableau, PowerBI is also made by Microsoft, and I suspect more likely to work seamlessly with the rest of the updating process.