What to expect from BI reporting

Gone are the days spending hours generating reports that immediately lead to more questions. Your obsolete reporting software or homegrown tools are leaving your business exposed to a range of critical risks and missed opportunities. BI reporting allows you to quickly, visually and cost-effectively get the answers you need to conduct business, manage budgets, and make accurate decisions.

The ability to turn raw company data into actionable intelligence is at the core of today’s successful businesses.

Data is increasingly more important to everyone’s role. Its value is in helping people do their jobs better, improve efficiencies and customer service, counter competitors and increase profit margins. BI reporting provides a complete picture of how your business is performing.

Visualizations

A key feature of business intelligence reporting is the visualization of the data in charts, graphs and tables. These diagrams making the information clear to understand and accessible.

According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of the population are visual learners. In business, visualizations can enhance employee productivity and your entire organization's output. Visualizations help you and your staff make important decisions faster.

The main goal of business intelligence reporting is to make data easy to understand so that accurate analysis can be efficiently carried out. Reporting is a necessary prerequisite of the analysis stage. BI collects and presents data that is ready to be analyzed. Business Intelligence reporting empowers the end-users with the information to become experts in their corresponding area of business.

Benefits of BI reporting visualisation are:

1. see relationships and patterns between operational and business activities
2. identify and act on emerging trends faster
3. tell a story with your data
4. enhances employee productivity

Answer your questions

BI reporting is ad hoc, meaning you can carry it out out whenever you need to answer a question or check the KPIs you are monitoring. The underlying figures in reports can be presented to backup actions and explain decision-making behaviors and often the real value lies in the data behind the metrics.

Reporting might show that four of your sale reps are below budget this month. That’s a 'what happened' style of reporting. What BI reporting can tell you is the 'why' because you can slice or dice the information presented. Business Intelligence reporting can marry the sales data to other outside data through a common dimension, like time.

With BI Reporting you can also take a look at how the reps perform this month vs last month in sales. You then break that down by product groups to find the lines they aren't selling. Then you change the measure to be gross profit instead of sales value to obtain another perspective about their performance.

Business Intelligence environments like Phocas can pull in CRM data or payroll information which explains that the reps in question have been away or were be instructed to sell more of the low value products that are taking up space in the warehouse.

BI reporting helps demonstrate meaningful correlations that can be used to change the direction or instruction given to the sales reps.

BI reporting that everyone can use

The greater the accuracy, the comprehensiveness and speed of accessing BI reporting and information, the better the decisions will be about and for the business.

Find out more about BI reporting by downloading this free eBook, Reporting metrics.