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For many businesses, cross- and up-selling are among the most important objectives in customer management.When a customer calls a business, it seems to be the perfect time for cross- or up-selling activities.

• May any incoming call therefore equally be seen as potential for cross- and up-selling?
• And may cross- and up-selling also be successful if the customer has actually called in order to complain?
• Does success depend on how long the customer had to wait in the loop?

The arcplan library is a very useful tool for coordinating the layout of reports. All objects which are extracted from a library behave equally on the reports with regard to the selection of the subsequently described properties.

The Right Offer for the Right Customer at the Perfect Time

NBA meets NBA

A successful team in the American Basketball League NBA combines four crucial characteristics:

• the ability to work in a team
• scoring
• inspiration
• passing the ball to one another

But what does that have to do with the technical concept next best activity (NBA)? This question was discussed with the participants in the course of a workshop at the Call Center Association (Call Center Verband) Spring Conference 2013. The challenges for the implementation of an NBA concept were specifically identified and ideas for solutions were developed.

Step 1: Installing and Configuring IIS

Check whether IIS7 is installed

• Go to URL: http://localhost.de/
• The result should look as follows:

The new functions READMETADATA() and PLACEMETADATA() offer a range of quite new possibilities to the arcplan designer. As shown in the arcCorporation Demo, data queries can be dynamically set up and modified via drag & drop.

The set-up of such a query is described below.

arcplan is a tool which poses few limits for the developer. Due to its structure, the developer is very flexible in designing his reports. This is a major advantage, as the reports can thus be very flexibly adjusted to the users' needs. However, it may quickly turn into a disadvantage, as well, as reports may contain many hundreds of objects with correspondingly many links. Without guidelines for the development, an application quickly becomes confusing and hard to maintain. In particular, this holds true for third parties or new team members, who often find it difficult to initially adapt to an application. Even the developer himself may lose the overview.

In case of arcplan applications, it is quite common that the relational data source from which the framework data for navigation, user administration, comments etc. are extracted are located on one server for the development, test and/or production version. This complicates the switch between these databases, as almost all metadata apart from the server connection is placed in the arcplan repository. In particular, this includes the database name, which now complicates the simple switch between various databases on the same server.

Database queries are defined by multiple objects in arcplan. Apart from the object with the query itself, other objects define the columns, rows and filter settings. In so doing, they are able to influence themselves, as well (performance arrows, selection-based filters…)
Linking the objects for a database query is defined by the connection of the objects in the connection mode. Arrows are drawn. Even though the objects are frequently set up together, the place or the order of the objects is irrelevant for the function. These objects may even be located on various reporting levels.

With the new function REPLACEEXPRESSION, arcplan 7 affords the possibility to influence the automatically generated SQL and MDX statement. This has the benefit that a design can continue to be made with “arrows” and that one is not limited to formulas. Currently, only simple adjustments of the query are possible with this tool; however, there is a large impact on the resulting possibilities.

arcplan offers a number of possibilities to set up a classic V-Lookup, as it is often used in Excel. One of these possibilities can be found under the blog entry Tips & Tricks: The Repeat Loop as Performance Killer.

The method described here works via the cross product of two tables and, as bulk operation,  constitutes a “Left Outer Join”, while the intersection constitutes an “Inner Join”.

In order to ensure performant reporting based on SAP BW, it is necessary to avoid redundant requests. An important element in this context is the optimized master data request. This can be implemented particularly easily and effectively for hierarchy objects (especially menu hierarchies).

In any application, there are always central functions which control a generic process. These functions request reporting-specific functions from the central area. If, for example, a report only requests data when needed, but is supposed to be directly updated when a favorite is activated, the update must be triggered by the central document.

Here, the problem arises that there may also be reports which are always up to date. In this case, the central function must not activate the button for manual update because this would not exist in this report. Thus, there would be an error report.