Do you struggle to get the numbers you need to manage your business? Many others do too!
Dashboard reports are of great value when they always reflect the reality of the here and now.
And when they come to life with always current information and an ability to rotate perspectives and drill to detail in moments it gives a buzz that, for some, is better than sex.
This week in our firm, our professional team in Asia at Sherwood Group Consulting using Infor PM. rolled out the preliminary design and a working prototype of a BI tool for a large sales force based organization.
Impressive, beyond our expectation, excellent and just what we need were some of the comments, along with it can do this that and the next thing on analysis.
It made me feel good to hear that, but the truth is, all we did was assemble their data and present it in an homogenized way in a BI web tool.
In this early adopter stage in their business, with warts and all and unfinished screens, this had people just so pleased to see their data assembled and in a meaningfully presented way, in their familiar organization structures. In the end, despite any effort it may take to clean up the data, that is all that matters.
They were also excited that it presented as useful information and that they could drill down immediately. This meant there was no need to go elsewhere for more information. Canned reports can be reduced as people will already have what they need to run their operations.
With much of the hard work done, as this BI tool gets more populated on a daily basis it may never get past the design stage . Why so? Because it will likely be constantly changing as the business learns how to manage with it and matures its use. No issue there, as reflecting the most up to date view of both the data and the organizations is what BI tools do well. Things like products, as they are added to the database, then appear in context, as the numbers come in. This also occurs without any need to change the reports.
Over time, in any business, everyone knows that the dynamics that created a report in the first place will mature as intuitive understanding of the base level data evolves. This often leads to legacy reporting being no longer focused properly or even being relevant. As for the myriad of reports that have been specified, in our BI rollout, there are now many questions as to their need.
For example on any given day in the month a business typically needs to be able to see a single value of its sales.
And then to be able to drill down into the lower levels and the details, like products, the customer or group, the business and channel it was sold through and even the salesperson who sold it.
Being able to see the invoice detail may be useful too.
And to be sure sales are profitable, operations need product gross profits all at the same levels,
Canned reports typically only report at the end of the month and then only in summary, which is far too late to stop any real time attrition.
Vital information like the component cost and who suppliers are plus breakdowns of department activity costs that went into to production and getting things delivered is a nightmare to get hold of. Even Blind Freddy knows that a canned reports only tell us to go looking. But with BI tool it does the looking too and it is a snap.
Canned reports simply fail to deliver at the levels needed to run a business. And even if they get half way there they are slow to produce and clumsy to use.
Using traditional reports can be as unwieldy as the middle ware process that prepares them. In larger organizations this is typically the cause of much of the frustration where the dynamics of matrix cross functions see lags dilute focus and time to take action.
So why do so many organizations persist with traditional dashboards and summary reports that just focus on fixed or functional areas?
And why do they persist in spending valuable time to dig for the detail, by going to another report or a listing of the raw data, to do further analysis?
At the grass roots, getting sales information may be quite easy, just by listing the invoice detail. And if your supply chain and costing people are on the ball, costing sheets will be there as well to show supplier and department activity and costs for each product.
If you think BI is new then take a look around. The tools have been there for decades but are often lost in the functional Sales Hype or in IT speak. You will find managers using sales invoiced and sales order lists to get sales information! And if they don’t have a decent system to roll it all up and group it, a personal spreadsheet will likely be doing the job and it will also work for analysis. But what ever way they do it, linking product sales and cost information will mean they can calculate gross profit on each product sold, as it occurs.
With this information, even in such tools as an Excel pivot table, it can easily show total sales for the day month or year for any business by channel customer and salesman etc.. And by adding a dimension for budgets and agreeing on targets, performance can track that way too. So you see, BI is nothing new.
In large and small organizations alike it is that simple. Bigger guys have more resources to access their database directly with enterprise BI tools that allow this “business intelligence” to be applied directly to the raw data. But the process is no more or no less the same. They use the raw information to first rollup then drill down and analyze in detail so they can ask questions that allow them to take actions to correct matters of concern.
But even for small guys, having disparate systems and processes still leaves a quandary. Organizations who have flattened to cut out middle managers who once did the analysis, see direct access to detail no longer a choice but an imperative. Small guys need it too as middle managers have always been a luxury so they generally only do BI themselves the hard way.
These days with efficient and well organized transaction systems, adding a simple BI tool on the top allows executives and mangers to see the big picture then get straight to the detail.
Managed the same way, information like sales activity can mean sales people can see the value of their weekly activity such as lead generation and lead conversion and so on.
Here are a couple of examples
Sales Activity
By collating sales activity for example, lead generation and conversion can be measured weekly. With numbers of leads generated, calls made, meetings booked, and prospects qualified, sales closed, and sales completed added to tracking information, the performance can be measured to focus time on helping the back enders .
This is vital to ensure sales numbers are achieved even for small teams but even more so in large widely spread sales forces. For good salespeople they do this anyway and they also keep track of commission they will get.
Sales Development Impact
For cross functional activity measuring the value of sales force development and customer service impact is vital to know where to focus to grow the business. By tracking these activities to a salesperson’s results makes it much easier to focus on areas that need development to improve.
Pre and post training evaluations are also very easy to see once you connect the development activity to the sales person’s results.
Managing business is not about chasing reports but about systematically managing the numbers on sales and operational aspects that drive the business.
Large or small, without good business intelligence, access to data is still seat of the pants or intuitive management, despite the plethora of static reports that continue. In large organizations with thousands of players, reactive response management is too slow. So the need for a BI tool is a “No Brainer”.
Dashboard reports too are of great value if they always reflect the reality of the here and now. And when they come to life with always current information with an ability to rotate perspectives and drill to detail in moments it gives a buzz that for some is better than sex.
In the past as we focused on speeding up or reporting processes our aim was spend more time on analysis and less on the preparation.
These days with the business intelligence transparency maturing in organizations, it is letting managers and operations alike get to the heart of their issues on a day to day basis. This means they spend less time in analysis more time in action.
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About
 Sherwood Group Consulting
Performance Management matters
Since 1993. Sherwood Group Consulting has been advising business on best practice in reporting and business performance management.
As specialists, Sherwood Group Consulting has high expertise in key aspects of business management and finance across a wide spectrum of business domains. Using leader software and working closely with vendors we add change management and project delivery services to the mix to make it all work.
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