Ultimate Guide to Operational Reporting

One of the outcomes of rapid digital transformation is that enterprises now have access to massive amounts of transactional data. By carefully monitoring all this data, business leaders are able to have a finger on the pulse of business operations — across various functions, business units, and locations. 

They use operational reports to monitor data at a granular level. Various departments generate a set of reports on a periodic basis keeping track of all key metrics that are important to them. 

In addition to operational reporting/transactional reporting, business leaders are also using BI tools to garner insights from data – often combining data from multiple sources (internal and external) – to drive data-driven business decisions. 

What is operational reporting?

Various departments/functions need different types of reports. For instance, finance teams want to periodically generate reports that capture revenue growth, gross margins and net margins, accounts receivable and payable details, etc. HR leaders are looking for operational data on salaries, attendance, possible increase in headcount, etc. Leaders in procurement and supply chain need operations reports that track supplier data, on-time delivery data of suppliers, risk reports, etc. 

Senior management leaders want to look at operational data holistically — combining data from various sources. They want next-generation dashboards that cull out operational data from across functions, locations, and business units. It gives business users access to structured data and information, providing a tactical view of organization-wide metrics. 

The difference between operational reporting and analytics

Modern enterprises of today understand the difference between operational reporting and analytics. Operational reporting is simply data about operations – by department, by function. It is data and information on everything that matters to them. It helps business users capture any specific actions to be taken. For instance, the finance team may look at operational reports to check how they’re doing on receivables. 

On the other hand, analytics is more strategic. It is about using multiple data sets and data models, to ask questions for which data may provide answers. Why is the gross margin low? Is it because our product mix is like that? Should we increase marketing spends on higher-margin products? Such questions are often asked and analytical models provide data-driven insights. 

Challenges to Operational Reporting

Often, operational reporting is part of the organization’s overall business intelligence strategy. But BI is a high-level view of the organization, providing direction for long-term strategies, whereas operational reporting being short-term, needs more low-level, granular data in real-time. Using reports generated from dated information can make it less effective.

Additionally, sometimes, companies end up trying to do operational reporting with BI tools designed for analytics. 

Another common challenge is that business users have to rely on IT teams to generate certain reports and this becomes a bottleneck. 

Benefits of Operational Reporting

Operational reporting can help businesses measure several key aspects of their core activities to introduce incremental improvements. It could take various forms such as:

• Optimizing resource utilization
• Reducing costs
• Improving production efficiency
• Enhancing customer satisfaction
• Increasing service coverage
• Increasing employee productivity, and so on.

What are companies looking for while choosing a tool for operational reporting

Digital transformation is seeing businesses migrate to the cloud partly or wholly, distributing data in a multi-cloud environment. To meet their real-time operational reporting requirements, business leaders and users need the reporting tool to incorporate certain best practices. These include:

1. Providing a Unified View of Data: Often, data gets distributed between on-prem and multi-cloud systems. Many reporting tools can pull data from the cloud but not the on-prem databases. A tool that can pull data from all the databases and provide a unified view is important to identify trends and forecast future possibilities. 
2. Self-Service capabilities: Business users should be able to generate the reports themselves. Sometimes, some tools require the IT team to generate the report for the user. This poses two problems. One is that the user has to wait for IT to do it. Secondly, by the time the report reaches them, the data could be outdated and the goalpost may have shifted.
3. Customized View: Different aspects of operational reporting need different kinds of data presented in a different format. The reporting tool should enable the user to personalize the view and offer enough pre-built templates to choose from to make his job easier.
4. Secure Data: Data protection laws insist on permission-based access to data. The tool should be able to authenticate the users and provide access to data based on their role and authorization to ensure compliance as well as data privacy.
5. Pre-built reports that work off-the-shelf: Today, companies are looking for an operational reporting tool that comes with pre-built reports, so it is easy for business users to monitor additional data. 
6. Scheduled reports: Automation is directly proportional to productivity. This includes scheduling of reports to be run at a predefined frequency and electronic document bursting and distribution of reports based on your policies.
7. Ability to drill down and look at granular data: Also, business users now want a solution that makes it easy for them to peel below the surface and look at granular data, using filters and rules. 

Orbit for Operational Reporting

Orbit is a next-generation operational reporting tool that integrates the best practices, pulling data from all sources — on-prem and the cloud. It ensures data protection and security, aligning with the organizational governance and policies to minimize authentication efforts. It empowers business users to generate their own reports, schedule the report generation, and customize their view by offering thousands of pre-built reports.

In addition to that, the Orbit’s Operational Reporting tool is:

• Platform agnostic and works with any ERP including Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), Oracle Cloud ERP (Oracle Fusion) Applications, NetSuite, PeopleSoft, Taleo, Salesforce, and many more
• Integrates with Excel to allow business users to leverage the features of the Microsoft tool using real-time data
• Orbit’s SQL DirectQuery supports organizations to be agile and data-driven. Without having to save scripts on desktop, users can centrally maintain, share and reuse scripts as SQL Models to create reports that cannot be produced by semantic data models and create data extracts and much more
• Facilitates collaboration across teams without duplication of data or siloes
• Designed to handle very large volumes of data, the data grid functionality provides users the ability to search, organize, and interpret data efficiently

To know more about operational reporting with Orbit Reporting and Analytics tool, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/operational-reporting/