The compound return on report automation

When it comes to paginated reports they have a specific use compared to dashboards. With dashboards you expect them to be current as soon as you view them and every time you view them. With reports you expect them to be a snapshot, a static point in time but that does not mean they need to take ages to prepare?

‍

How much time do you spend creating reports?

Spending hours and in some cases days to create a report every time you need to visualise some data is a complete waste of time. If you are recreating the same report each week or month, that is nothing short of madness! All of that time is spent accomplishing the same task so nothing actually moves forwards. It's report groundhog day!

‍

We firmly believe in the create once, use many framework. Reports should be re-runnable at the click of a button, bringing in a fresh set of prepared data to fill out graphs and charts with no additional interaction required from the user. Better still they should be parameterised to allow the user to be able to change what data selection they want to see in their report. Parameters like dates and product types can give users the ability to 'create' their own reports without having to ask 'IT' to create a new report for them enabling self service for the business.

‍

Being able to run a report at the click of a button is good, having reports appear in user mailboxes and infolder locations on a schedule is even better. Repots that take a long time to run can be run over night giving them a solid block of time to complete instead of waiting for them to complete during the day. Running reports on live systems especially during the day can also cause performance issues. We recommend reporting off a secondary or reporting instance should budget be available.

‍

Report and dashboard commonalities

There are some common things users expect from both their reports and dashboards. There are also a few things that users do not know but should be understood for example, creating a dashboard is about 1% of the total effort required to visualise data. The dashboard or report is the tip of the iceberg with the user only seeing what is above the waterline. The rest is all to do with the data, the data sources, integration of data sets, the ETL processes, data pipelines, the quality tests implemented and the calculation of KPI's and metrics.

‍

When the data is all sorted any reports and dashboards can be created quickly and easily. You can even allow your users to create their own reports knowing that any calculations and metrics have been pre 'crunched' and calculated using the agreed formulae.

‍

Conclusion

When you are looking to recover wasted time, focusing on your reporting is a great place to start. A huge amount of time goes into creating reports, often the same reports over and over again when creating new reports would be a better use of time. Whilst your initial instinct may be to focus on the actual reports and dashboards, you need to be thinking about the data, how it is stored, processed, crunched and made available to the business. Everything starts with the data and ends with the presentation.