Why your Enterprise Reporting Platform must include Operational Reporting as well

One of Orbit’s customers, amongthe world’s largest aluminum rolling companies, uses our operational reporting platform to track a wide range of business metrics and KPIs across departments.

For instance, the supply chain team at the company uses Oracle EBS (Enterprise Business Suite) for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply-chain management. Considering the scale of operations there was a crying need for a world-class reporting and data visualization solution.

Specifically, the client wanted a reporting solution that would help their SCM leaders track data across the entire supply chain – from procurement of raw materials to the final product. Some of the key areas they wanted to track in real-time included:

• Coal Inbound data
• Vehicle Inbound data
• Yard Management
• Inventory Management
• Summary of all key SCM data from Oracle EBS

This was a specific example of how Orbit is being used by the supply chain team. Other teams at the company including finance and production also use Orbit for operational reporting but to track other metrics.

In one of our meetings, the client explained the value proposition of an operational reporting solution.

An enterprise-wide BI platform is not enough. While that would help with top-level strategic planning and management review meetings, for day-to-day business operations, a modern operational reporting solution is a “must-have.” This operational reporting platform is used by various departments to track key metrics (relevant to their individual teams) on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These reports feed into the process of making operational decisions, which are done with real-time data.

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses need to be able to identify challenges ahead of time, capitalize on their strengths, and quickly respond to opportunities. Enterprises need to improve operational efficiency and break barriers to innovation and growth, and data holds the key to making that happen.

Business leaders need a holistic view of their operations and assess key performance indicators in real-time to make critical decisions across functions such as supplier management, production, marketing, sales, quality, and finance.

Of course, in addition to a department or function-level view of data, an integrated view of all functions is certainly valuable. It helps with understanding the dynamic relationship between the different variables of the business and how these align with the larger business goal.

To reiterate, some of the key benefits of operational reporting include:

• Providing insights in real-time through interactive and customizable dashboards that help with fact-based decision-making.
• Tracking the progress of the various levels of operations of all departments to improve efficiencies, save time and money, and optimize resource utilization.
• Enabling identification of patterns to forecast trends and build strategies to leverage opportunities.
• Improving day-to-day operational efficiency and increasing productivity.

Use Cases for Operational Reporting

Broadly, there are several use cases and scenarios where operational reporting is extremely valuable. It is important to note here that operational reporting is different from operational analytics.

Additionally, operational reporting is not only about big data or data stored in an ERP. It is often important to bring in data from multiple sources and prepare operational reports as needed. It is also critical to have a Change Data Capture (CDC) capability, to ensure reports are prepared with the latest data in the ERP (or other business systems).

For the purpose of this blog, we highlight a few use cases of operational reporting.

Marketing and sales teams can use operational reporting to track the correlation between marketing budget and new customer signups, the impact of discounting on customer acquisition, etc.

The finance team can use operational reporting to track account receivables, account payable, cash flow trends by month, etc. The goal is to use these reports and dashboards to capture trends, with the goal of improving financial performance and overall business performance.

In the production or manufacturing department, operational reports can enhance production, improve resource utilization, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.

Operational Reporting Best Practices

To experience the benefits of operational reporting, businesses need a modern operational reporting solution that has the following capabilities:

• Handling Volumes: The tool should be able to handle very large volumes of operational and transactional data. It should also facilitate easy search by organizing the data efficiently and interpreting it correctly.
• Personalized Reports: Businesses need a unified view of enterprise data but customized reports for each function. Users should be able to personalize the report output and analyze data as suited to their requirements. They should be able to save the insights drawn from these reports without modifying the underlying code or creating duplicate copies of the original report.
• Querying: Providing a central repository of scripts that can be shared and reused can simplify and accelerate the speed of creating reports that semantic data models cannot produce.
• Customized Data Outputs: Ready to use design templates for a variety of purposes such as invoices and purchase orders, in different formats including Word or Excel can help create print- and share-ready documents quickly, thereby saving time.
• Automate Scheduling: Automating report generation at scheduled intervals can save time and improve productivity. Electronic document bursting and distribution of reports can also be automated and aligned to the organization’s policies.
• Data Security: Operational data is a treasure that needs to be governed by row-level data security rules to limit access to authorized users alone.
• Integrate with ERP: The operational reporting tool should integrate with the enterprise ERP system to enable consolidated enterprise reporting.

Orbit’s Operational Reporting Solution

Orbit offers its enterprise customers a truly next-generation, plug-and-play operational reporting platform with the following capabilities:

• Excel Reporting: XLEdge is an extension of Orbit that allows you to pull real-time data on-demand from multiple applications into Excel. Microsoft Excel is one of the world’s most utilized data analysis tools, but it does not allow real-time access to data. As a result, the data becomes dated and the reports are rendered useless for making important business decisions. With XLEdge, data is refreshed every time, making it relevant and current.
• Self-Service: Often business users depend on the IT team to generate their reports. This causes a delay between the request, the report generation, and their receiving it. This too has its challenges in being useful for drawing actionable insights. Orbit provides business users with the ability to self-service their needs and generate reports whenever they need it.
• Platform Agnostic: Being a cloud-native tool, Orbit can be used on any platform and also integrates with any ERP system.
• Orbit SQL DirectQuery: Orbit SQL DirectQuery allows users to centrally maintain, share, and reuse scripts as SQL Models. This can be used to create reports that semantic data models cannot produce, create data extracts, and much more.
• Orbit Insights: This feature allows business users to personalize the report output and analyze data in any number of ways. These analyses can be saved as Insights without the need to modify the underlying code or without the need to create duplicate copies of the original report.

Other features and capabilities include – ad-hoc data reporting, scheduling reports/jobs, pixel-perfect reports, and data security. For more information, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/operational-reporting/