For any organisation wanting to improve cost outcomes, visibility of data through simple, powerful reporting is critical. Inefficient reporting systems can waste a lot of time and prevent you from making strides towards improvements on the bottom line. Despite it seeming like a big exercise to change this, it might surprise you to know that it may take less than a month to permanently transform your reporting outcomes and deliver powerful decision-making reports that will engage and support your entire operation.
What is effective reporting?
Being able to identify and understand how to address problems is critical to meeting or exceeding business targets. Information presented through reports is the window to this. The collecting of data and the analysis of this data for specific trends / conditions within your business can alert you of problems so that you can take action promptly and effectively.
Effective reporting needs to provide insight and visibility into what’s happening in your business – it needs to rapidly identify where the business is not performing to expectation and provide access to sufficient detail info to facilitate understanding of operational causes of this failure. It is the avenue for business monitoring and business improvement. When provided with visibility to the workings of the operation though sound reports, all team members can be challenged to find opportunities to improve operational and cost performance.
When creating an effective report, it's important to consider what information is important and how it will be used. Reports should be created with the user in mind; they need to be easy to read and understand so users can make informed decisions quickly. Additionally, formatting should be consistent across all reports, so users don't have to spend time navigating unfamiliar layouts when looking for specific information.
How to create Effective Reporting
Understanding the data and ensuring it is relevant to the operational and strategic decisions that need to be made, 4 key ingredients are essential:
- Timeliness.
- Information presented in the report must tell a story.
- The story must be simple in order for owners to engage with it. For example, a mining department report highlighting cost overruns in mine blasting must point to overspend on emulsion as the main culprit. However, on its own, this isn’t enough. The cost owner also needs to see if this is a consequence of higher blast volumes and also if this is one off variance or a trend.
- Must be able to look behind the reported numbers to understand what makes them up. This is the key step that facilitates analysis and improvement. I.e., in the Emulsion example, the blast supervisor needs to understand if the cost overrun is the result of ongoing excessive use of emulsion in the blasting process or are you paying too much for the product. These are the questions that lead to changes generating a sustainable reduction in cost base.
Generating effective reports doesn’t need to take forever and cost the earth!
The three key elements needed to generate effective reports:
- A well-designed, well-built data warehouse. This step is often overlooked in the desire to get reports built and rolled out. It is critical however, not just for ensuring the usefulness and performance of reports, but also to guarantee that all reports are based on a single, verifiable source of truth.
- Simple intuitive reporting software tools.
- An experienced, capable partner – whether that be your internal BI team or an outsourced service, it is critical they understand both the data modelling (IT) aspect as well as understanding the business need.
Ramesys can help transform your data into decision making intelligence with our pre-configured data warehouse, pre-built ERP interfaces and team of in-house experts guiding you every step of the way.
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