Goal Management in CRM 2011 for a custom entity

Goal Management is a completely unique stand alone feature in the new revamped crm 2011. It provides an organization multiple touchstones to monitor the progress of an activity. You can provide roll ups of individual goals to provide progress reports on a department.

In this post I will walk through goal management setup for a custom entity. The custom entity is a stripped down version of the orders OOB entity, with multiple status options.

a. Create a new solution to hold the customizations.

b. Create a custom entity called Custom Orders and associate it with the new solution.

c. Create a new N:1 relationship with contact. Add fields to the custom entity similar to the setup below.Notice that the status reason option set has been modified, with 2 new values: Order Placed and Shipped.

Once we have the forms setup and a bunch of data entered, we can now create goals to monitor the custom entity status. 

1. Create a new goal metric, which defines what we are going to measure against. Go to Sales/ Goal Metrics and click New. Enter a value for the name and select Metric type as Count (as we are measuring the number of orders in shipped and Order placed status).

2. Select the Rollup Fields sub grid and click on Add new Rollup Field button.

3. Enter the values as in the screen shot below. 

Let us walk through the screen for a second here. 

Step 1:

The Rollup Field is the bucket you are assigning the counts to. In this case, we are setting a value for In progress Custom orders.

Step 2:

Source Record Type is the entity that you are interested in (Custom orders in our case)

We want the state to be Active and Status to be "Order Placed".

Step 3: 

The Record Type is the same as Source Record Type in Step 2. Select the Date field to be "Modified On".

The result is that all Custom orders with state Active and Status Order Placed whose modified on date falls within the goal period are counted towards In progress bucket.

4. Similar to previous step create a rollup field for actuals bucket and select all Custom orders with state Active and Status Shipped whose modified on date falls within the goal period.

5. Create a new Goal from Sales/ Goals. Enter a name, and select the "Custom Order Status" goal metric created in previous steps. Every goal needs to be associated with a goal owner, against whom the goal is evaluated. 

For the time period, I have selected a custom period spanning 3 months. 

The target Shipped for the 3 months is 10 units.

Save the goal.

6. Let us take a look at the lower section of the form, specifically the Actuals and Goal Criteria.

The Goal Criteria section allows the goal to be evaluated against different sets of data. In our case, we can check for all Shipped status Custom Orders that is owned by goal owner. Else, we can create a specific data set using a query (for example, all shipped units in a specific state).

The Actuals section represents the available Custom Order counts at the time of the last Roll up execution.

7. Select the recalculate button on the Goal ribbon. Once rollup is completed, the Actuals section should have some data in it.

8. Notice in the left navigation there is a section for participating records for In progress and Actual counts. They represent the records that are statisfied by the two goal metric rollup fields

In the chart, the value for Todays Target is target value multiplied by time elapsed, then divided by total goal time period. In our case, it is 10* 45/90 ~8

(10 being the target, 45 being the time elapsed between 10/1/11 to 12/15/11, and 90 being total goal period which is the number of days from 10/1/11 to 12/31/11).

Remember that the participating records are not automatically updated, as the recalculate process could be a bit data intensive and thus needs to be run manually. 

The concept of goal management can be used for any entity that needs to be evaluated with a target. It is very customizable and easy to setup and maintain. The best part of goal management is the visual representation of the metrics through a set of OOB charts. These charts provide a quick view of the progress towards the target specified.