What is Custom Automated Reporting?
Custom reporting involves tailoring reports to your organisation’s unique needs, unlocking crucial insights from your data. Automating this process requires that you only set up reporting parameters once, saving you countless labour hours.
Other benefits include:
- Creating a single source of truth where you can holistically analyse data, giving you an accurate snapshot of your business.
- Fewer reporting errors by limiting manual data entry.
- The ability to quickly and easily adapt reports to meet changing business needs.
WCIGs Custom Reporting and Automation Journey
Before custom reporting and automation, WCIG relied on team leaders to manually generate aXcelerate reports each month.
This led to:
- Reports with out of date and inaccurate data.
- Bottlenecks due to busy schedules.
- Missing reports because of employee skill gaps.
- Difficulty running useful exception reporting.
- Low-quality reporting that lacked visualisation.
On top of this, managers couldn’t unlock detailed insights due to siloed information. This led to outstanding invoices and reporting discrepancies.
How Insight38 Helped
After analysing WCIG’s reporting needs, we loaded their aXcelerate data into Azure Data Lake and SQL Server then used Power BI reporting to visualise their data.
With Power BI, we created charts, filters and drill-through functionality, allowing in-depth visualisation across management and operations. As WCIG’s needs evolved, we worked closely with the leadership team to tweak each report to better fit their needs.
We also integrated financial and planning data from Sage Intacct and Excel to create a single snapshot of business information.
For example:
- Planned vs actual hours worked
- Invoices paid and income received
- Outstanding invoices
Finally, we set up automatic notifications for tasks and reporting exceptions. Emails remind trainers about assessment due dates and the details to complete them, while exception notifications highlight important metrics for further analysis.
The results?
- WCIG stakeholders have a single source of truth with company-wide visibility.
- Automatic reminders and exception notifications to ensure smooth operations.
- 95% improvement in trainer assessment completion times versus manual tracking and reminders.
- Countless hours saved on data processing, reporting and manual admin, giving employees extra time for day-to-day tasks.
- 83% reduction in outstanding invoices thanks to data visualisations.
- Managers have access to real-time data through daily reporting, helping them predict potential trends.
“Program managers now have live information to help them make decisions about their area of the business. In some cases, this has resulted in major changes in the way things are done at WCIG. Much of this information was not available before, either because staff lacked the necessary expertise to compile it, it simply took too long for a busy manager to gather, or was on our wishlist of things we would like to know. “ Ron Miers – Former CEO WCIG
Automate Your Custom Reporting and Enjoy Countless Insights at Your Fingertips
Your company’s processes, operations and data are all unique. Automation and custom reporting are a must to unlock crucial insights and pinpoint opportunities to improve your business.
If you aren’t already, use reporting automation to:
- Skip unnecessary data processing and focus on using reporting insights in your business.
- Avoid manual data entry errors.
- Provide stakeholders with easy-to-understand visual representations of data.
- Integrate company-wide data into a single, up-to-date report.
Want to enjoy the benefits of automation and custom reporting like WCIG? Reach out to us at Insight38 to discover how reporting automation can improve your company.
Is Azure Data Lake within SQL Server or is that a separate program?