Creating reports isn’t new. Every business uses them, and have been for a long time. We’ve all seen them. Most prominent is the financial report. These are traditionally run at the end of the month to show profit and loss, project costs or labour costs. Then we also have a vast array of spreadsheets (often manipulated for display purposes). Perfect, right?
The biggest problem with time based reporting (weekly, monthly etc) is that by the time you identify a problem, it is often too late, and the damage has been done. But what if you could get more? What if you could get live reporting, without the need to “run” reports. What if you could report on more than just financials? What if you could visualise your data instead of the traditional tabled reports.
This is where Live Dashboarding can now help. It’s all too common where companies set KPI’s for their staff with no real means of measuring them. Sure, if it’s related to revenue this can be measured, but what if it is a non dollar driven target? Imagine a situation where you can now measure and display KPI’s in a live manner.
One of the biggest game changers is the ability to use data from multiple sources, and combine them seamlessly into one live reporting platform. A great example may be that you have certain time based targets for different people in a simple spreadsheet, and are recording times in Fortix Enterprise. In this situation the times recorded would visually be shown against the targets as if it was one system. Not only is it convenient and up to date at all times, it eliminates someone having to collate data and prepare reports.
What this means is that if an event occurs in your business, appropriate action can be taken there and then. Be it adding additional staff to a task to make sure it’s completed in time, or finding out why a deadline is not being met the minute it is late, or close to being late.
Fully portable, live reports, less time collating and comparing information, less room for data “manipulation” but those reporting back to you, extra software to buy that will be out of date in 6 months time.
When you think about it, live business intelligence dashboards make sense. After all, you don’t look at your car’s dashboard to see what speed you were doing yesterday.
Guest post written by Sven Scheepers of Efficient Foundations
