Four Falsehoods about Operational Reporting

Your organization needs to equip its employees to meet the challenges of the next decade. That may require abandoning a few preconceived ideas about reporting and analytics. Here are four of the most common misunderstandings about operational reporting.

Falsehood #1: Users need to see big data

Typically the ERP data business users need to see is not that big. Instead, business users need to see “small” data that’s focused on areas like AP or general ledger or talent management.

In fact, users often start at a high-level view of their data then drill down to more granular, transactional-level details. They may start out on a dashboard, then iterate from a report, applying filters, date ranges, regions or departments, until they can get down to the individual transactions. If they focus only on dashboard-level charts or KPIs, they’ll likely miss out on crucial details.

Falsehood #2: ERP systems have all the data users need to see

Organizational data assets continue to increase, and some of that data is going to need to be viewed in the context of ERP data. This could be third party data, for example, from a supply chain partner, or it could be historical data held in a legacy system, or from a cloud application.

When users can connect to and report from these data sources, they obtain more value from existing data assets, such as “dark data” that has been collected in databases for years. For example, after re-engaging with a supplier, a business user might compare the current rate of damaged units with historical data on the supplier.

Conversely, when users can’t connect this data to their reporting system, they may resort to downloading it to a spreadsheet in order to slice and dice it – a time-consuming and error-prone workaround.

Falsehood #3: Operational reporting doesn’t require real-time access

Today, real time or near real-time data is essential for many business areas and verticals. For example, an HR department head needs to know exactly how many employees are out on a given day. Or, after several employees in a department give notice, HR wants to see metrics on that department to focus on retaining existing employees. In cases like these, HR can’t wait a day for a report before making hiring decisions.

Falsehood #4: Third party analytics solutions are adequate for operational reporting

In fact, although tools like PowerBI or Tableau are powerful, they are designed to be used by data scientists, not enterprise users. Often the data these tools use needs to be cleaned and modeled beforehand. More importantly, they may not respect your organization’s existing role-based security, so reports are not secured from users who shouldn’t have access. Any solution that reports on ERP data needs to be integrated with ERP access and security.

Orbit’s solution is designed to deliver reporting success for your organization. Orbit integrates with leading ERP and other applications and connects to multiple data sources so you can report on your entire organizational data. You can create a wide variety of reports and visualizations that you can schedule and share. Fully secure, Orbit complies with your existing ERP security down to the row level.

Talk to an expert about enhancing your operational reporting with Orbit.