Effective Reporting and Analytics system

Most companies run their reporting with a manual gear shift. While this keeps your analysts busy, you can be much more efficient if you switch to automatic.

Sometimes it’s the capacity of your data analysts that’s limiting you and your business.

In many companies analysts are in charge or running reports. They log into the various systems, pull out the data, combine it together, clean it up and turn it into a report.

Dependent on the complexity of your data sources and the cleanliness of your data, this can take 80% or even 100% of an analyst’s time. All they do is just running reports — week in, week out and then some more after the end of a month.

As a result the analysts don’t have time to answer any new questions.

ALERT: THAT’S NOT HOW IT’S MEANT TO BE!

An analyst shouldn’t be manually running reports, analysts shouldn’t be manually combining and transforming data over and over again. They should do it once and then delegate this dumb repeatable work to automated systems. The systems are really good at this.

When you switch to automated reporting you will:

1. Get your reports quicker without having to wait for an analyst to finish running the report,
2. Get your reports more frequently so you can make more timely decisions and actions,
3. Free up the time of your analysts so they can answer new questions for you,
4. Make your analysts faster when building new reports and analyses as they would have all the data in an easy to use format.

Just imagine this — your reporting system pulls in all the data (every day), it combines it and cleans it up according to your rules and spits out your reports every morning so it’s ready when you wake up. How would this change your life?

There are many options to implement an Effective Reporting and Analytics (ERA) system and I’ll get to that in another article. In the meantime here are the five basic criteria it should meet:

1. Combined data — all the key data you need is combined together in an easy to use format
2. Automated — data as well as the reports are being refreshed automatically — an analyst doesn’t need to touch it for it to run
3. Flexible — the reports as well as the data are easy and quick to amend, if you discover you need to tweak the report, it is a matter of minutes or hours max
4. Filterable — reports enable you to filter to an area you focus on today, focus can change over time and filterable reports facilitate this
5. Drillable — when you discover an area of a report that needs further investigation, you can easily and quickly drill down to explore the lower level detail

Summary:

If your reports are being run manually by your analysts, you are missing out and you will never reach the potential your data has to offer.

Unleashing the power of data requires you to set up an ERA system. It does take a bit of an effort but it is worth it.

And if you followed our DISC method and have been through the Insight stage you know how much value there is in your data. ERA system unlocks this potential.

Do you have a question about an ERA system? Let’s connect and have a chat.