Seeing Beyond the Spreadsheet: How Excel Can Enlighten Your Effective Efforts

Editor's Notes

• #4: Rita has been with Superion (formerly SunGard Public Sector) since August 1998. Superion has been an Apttus client since June 2011. Apttus CPQ is the only solution used for quoting clients at Superion.
• #5: To give you a little bit of background on what we do – as Denise said we are a software company and we have been providing software to local governments for over 35 years. Our customers comprise of Cities, counties, utility authorities, Universities, and foundations. The solutions we provide range from the administrative software needed in the finance departments to the laptops in the police cars and anything in between. Our customers are in every state and even some countries outside the united states such as some of the Caribbean countries. We write our software on several different platforms depending on what they customer is purchasing and we integrate most of them so you can use the same system across the organization.
• #6: We have a lot of separate systems….while we have done a great job over the years pulling information into Salesforce from our back end connections such as our accounting software….this has left a lot of spreadsheets flying around our office.
• #7: Last year at this very same conference I was introduced to X-Author for Excel. We began thinking and analyzing how this tool might improve our processes. I went back to the office and scheduled a demo. And today I would like show you just a few ways we use the X-author tool for excel in our Salesforce instance to create some apps that automated some manual processes for us.
• #8: We began looking at how we could utilize the X-author tool after last years Accelerate conference. If you have seen the tool at all you have probably seen the typical use of updating opportunities which was very appealing to us. But we had some unique things we wanted to do as well. We had a demo and ultimately decided to purchase the tool. We have rolled it out to our end users and they have been using it to update opportunities, maintain contacts, and look up pricing. But we also spent some time working with Apttus Managed Services in developing a quote document using X-author for Excel versus using X-author for word. I will explore that a little more when we look at the use cases listed here.
• #9: With the Opportunities app we wanted to provide each sales rep the ability to pull a list of the opportunities they own but filter out the Lost, Disqualified, Signed, and closed opportunities so that they were only working with on going pipeline. In addition, we needed to provide the managers the ability to pull all the opportunities for their team. This was accomplished by having a main app used by a typical sales rep or end user and a different app for each manager and their direct reports. I also have one that has ALL opportunities but currently no one is assigned to that one. Once they pulled the data down they needed to be able to update opportunities and save back to Salesforce.
• #10: I designed the app with color so that the end user can easily see what fields can be updated. The red indicates they can’t make changes and the green means they can make changes. We will look at this live in just a moment. What you see on the screen is just a small portion of the fields they can view and update. The first thing the rep needs to do besides connecting to the system and selectin the app is to click the retrieve opps button to pull in their owned opportunites.
• #11: Once the button is clicked the data loads down and they can start making changes. We have several custom fields that they can now update on the fly all at once without having to go in and out of every Opportunity. Again the managers would do the same in their App and it brings down all their team’s data for checking or changing. Just think about the amount of time each team member saves by doing this all at once. When changes are made the would click Save to SFDC and it updates all their changes.
• #12: This next use case I am pretty happy about because it automated something for my team from an admin perspective as well as several different users in the organization who were having to maintain this data by hand and it was very manual. So the goal was to provide a replacement of the existing manual process while ensuring that the data in the non-connected external systems in a real time update. We had to find a way to tie the products in salesforce to the existing manual processes while automating the process and providing a similar output.
• #13: Here is an example of the list that we had been maintaining by hand for several years. Notice it has a tab for every product line along with a list of the products in that line further subdivided. Any time we did any kind of change in the CPQ system we would send a list to the person who maintained the master list. They would update the list manually and then send an email to all the system administrators letting them know what changed so they could update their systems. There were several issues with this method besides the fact that it was maintained by hand. Several of the products were on multiple tabs since the product might apply across the lines, Names in the system didn’t match the names on the list which caused problems in the other systems that are maintained, and when a product was sunset but was still supported it had to be marked in red with no longer sold.
• #14: To automate this and clean up the list we added two fields to the product object. The Acronym List field represented the “tab” and the Section was for the area on that tab where the product should be listed. I exported the products on file and made sure every product had this populated. We had some products that need to be cleaned up but we can’t remove just yet. They are not valid products from the Apttus quoting perspective so I marked all of these as an invalid product with a section of Do Not Use. This will go a long way with the data clean up when we are able to remove them from the system. I used some automated tools to download and update these fields.
• #15: Once they were populated I was able to start writing the X-author app that would load these into the tabs and sections as needed. This accomplished what we needed and automated the list. Now when we add products or make changes we produce the list and send it to the admins. I removed hours of work from the person who maintained this manually and now the report is accurate to every product in Salesforce. Notice I still have a tab for every product line as populated in the drop down lists in Salesforce. In order to make this work I created a display map for every section on every tab that would populate the worksheet for the report. Then I formatted it so that every page would be formatted the same when I “print” it to a PDF.
• #16: This last use case allowed us to replace the current quote document that had several issues with a solution that would map to the Salesforce fields and provide both a preview document (which we use to just see it and has no signature line or terms) and an official generated document that would sent to the customer. This proved to be a bit more challenging than we originally thought but in the end we have a beautiful document that is easily maintained in the X-author app. We did do this with the help of the Managed Services team at Apttus (shout out to Shailesh Gupta) who was able to guide us into using features and functions we hadn’t considered since we were not that familiar with the product. It was definitely a collaborative effort. But now we can maintain this ourselves with a little effort because as we designed it we looked at it with the future in mind and did not hard code anything. This means as we change products or terms we can easily update this document.
• #17: On the screen was the document we were using when we began the process of designing and creating this quote document in X-Author. The programmer that wrote this document in Crystal did an amazing job pulling all the details and fields in from the quote proposal object. He even managed to create a single document that accommodated all our product lines and the various quote scenarios.
• #18: Here is a look at the app itself but keep in mind this is never seen by the end user because we are using presto to generate the document and automatically attach it to the quote. We use a separate worksheet as shown on the MaintFee tab to load in all the maintenance and then use a v-lookup formula to bring in the maintenance from the quote proposal object to get it to match.
• #19: Here is the example of the document today. The customer facing notes, payment terms, and additional terms print before the signature line and the product facing notes show after the signature line.
• #20: So are you ready to see this in action in real time?...Let’s do it.
• #21: I would encourage you to think outside the normal use of x-author to streamline your processes, reduce manual processes and make a great looking quote document.
• #22: If you have any questions or you want to snag some Apttus swag….follow me to the questions and answer phase.