Have you ever created a report in Sales Cloud or Engagement Cloud? The possibilities seem to be endless! The first step in the creation process is the most important one for any new analyst to take though. The first thing to do when creating a new reports is choosing which subject area to use.
A subject area is a collection of applications related data, that is available for reporting. But the list of subject areas that come with Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud is long. And if you start off with the wrong one and realize that too late, you cannot switch to another subject area without having to start your report over again.
So from the list off available ones, which subject area to use when starting a new report is an important decision.
Never too many subject areas
Do you actually know how many subject areas you get access to when you open up the analytics solution behind Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud?
429 subject areas to choose from indeed, I am not kidding. That seem like an awful lot, and it is, but it is actually a good thing! The reason for this madness, Oracle has on the same platform other cloud applications available: ERP Cloud, HCM Cloud, EPM Cloud, SCM Cloud, Loyalty Cloud, … Having multiple of these applications implemented on the same platform with a unified BI solution is off course super valuable.
But if you only have Sales Cloud or Engagement Cloud, most of the available subject areas are nothing more than unwanted noise. Luckily there is a way to hide them for your report designers. You can limit the list of available subject areas according to the cloud applications you are using. I discussed hot to do that in a previous post already.
Let’s say we hide the all subject areas except those for Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud. How may do we have left?
90 subject areas are left, that still does not help understanding which subject areas to use best. But have you implemented all functionality in Engagement Cloud? Are you using the Service functionality, or the Partner Relationship Management functionality? If not, why not use the same technique to hide those subject areas that do not correspond how you have implemented Engagement Cloud or Sales Cloud.
Looking pure at core sales force automation, there are about 45 subject areas that could be off interest
And we could go on, why not hiding the Lead related subject areas if you are not working with leads, or hide the Territory related ones if you use assignment rules instead of territory management?
Which subject area to use
But even from all the ones you are left with after hiding those you do not need, you still do not need to know all of them. There are only a handful that are use to start any report, all the others subject areas can be combines with the few core ones and just bring additional information into your reports.
Without wanting to claim this is a complete list, most of the reports I make start with one of the following subject areas:
- Sales – CRM Customer Overview for most of the account focused reports
- Sales – CRM Opportunities and Products Real Time for most of the opportunity focused reports when you are not interested in understanding how opportunities have evolved over time
- Sales – CRM Historical Pipeline when creating pipeline reports driven by data gathered using the opportunity snapshotting mechanism
- Marketing – CRM Leads Real Time for reports mainly about leads
- Sales – CRM Assets for most asset related reports
- Sales – CRM Business Plans for business plan focused reports
- Sales – CRM Sales Activity for activity based reports … obviously
Combining subject areas
But what about all the other subject areas then? They provide additional information. Well let me explain what their purpose is using a example.
The ‘Sales – CRM Opportunities and Products Real Time’ subject area, as stated above, provides access to a lot of opportunity data. Amongst them you can find the opportunity owner, which is the primary opportunity team member. The rest of the opportunity team is not directly available though, for this we need to add a second subject area to the report: ‘Sales – CRM Opportunity Resource’. I described how this particular example works in a YouTube video you can find here.
The same technique needs to be used to combine standard subject areas with custom subject areas. Yes indeed, not only can we reduce the list of available subject areas, most often we have to add some subject areas to allow reporting on implemented custom objects through custom subject areas
Removing additional subject areas from a report if you have added the wrong ones is not a problem, so you can experiment as much as you like. I just hope this blog post helps you choosing which subject area to use and start your report with. The initial subject area is the only one that cannot be replaced without starting report over again.
Have fun creating reports !
