How Can Report Automation Help Your Business
In a hyper-competitive business world, most enterprises, big or small, try to make the best decisions to create new opportunities and grow.
Hence, gauging the performance of an enterprise is essential, and data and insights are invaluable to gaining clarity.
Organizations allocate their resources to mine data, aggregate, and verify to make sense of their operational reality. For non-data engineers or coders, it can become nearly a full-time job.
A report from Deloitte suggests that half of the respondents to their surveys spend time generating reports manually.
You may wonder if this is the most cost-effective use of resources in our world, dominated by efficiencies, the rationale of budgetary constraints, and the aspiration to do better.
Over the last ten years, report automation has become a process with a strong value proposition for many companies that experience the heaviness of manual reporting. Read on.
What is Report Automation?
Report automation removes the intensive time dedication to process reports manually. Technically in layman’s terms, it works with APIs to collect data from different sources and gather them into a software platform.
Reports can be systematically refreshed at given intervals and delivered on time to an email address or a specific repository.
It also eliminates the over-reliance on someone’s skills to process the report and the risk of human mistakes.
But that’s not all. There is more.
What Are the Reasons to Move to Report Automation?
If your organization decides to leverage the report automation capability of your enterprise, there are several benefits that your teams will enjoy.
Here are some of them:
- Organizational alignment – The information is available and accessible to all concerned parties.
- Increased efficiency – Report automation eliminates errors and compresses time to produce the reports.
- Better use of the resources – Co-workers can spend more time on value-added activities like report analysis.
- Convenience – Data are pulled from different sources without manual effort.
- Mundane tasks reduction – Report automation reduces manual tasks.
- Gain quicker access to insights – More time for analysis, less time to figure out how to put a report together.
If the adoption of report automation seems like a no-brainer for organizations, the difficulty is sometimes more in selecting the tools to achieve that transformation.
There are plenty of options between off-the-shelf and custom-developed solutions. Hence, there is a bit of homework to do before moving to the due diligence of these solutions and it starts by defining your company’s needs Here is some food for thought on the way to define needs.
Define Your Needs
The most challenging thing for a company is not to acquire a tool; it is to understand what that tool needs to do for the enterprise. Therefore, you may need to consider a few points:
- Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the most important for your business? These are the KPIs you need to track.
- Who needs access to the report, and how often? It will ensure that the right people access the report systematically at different intervals.
- How will your organization access the report? Some people like email distribution; others prefer to access a platform.
- Which data do you want to see? These are the data that are essential to making decisions.
- Where are the data extracted? These are the different platforms your company uses from which data needs to be retrieved.
- How often do you need to access the report?
- What budget do you want to allocate to your report automation transformation?
Your Takeaways
Report automation can help your enterprise and business teams and functions work more efficiently in your constant effort to continuously improve your business.
Start your transformation by defining your needs. Clarifying what you need will help you identify the technical solutions your business requires. Investing in the right product is not easy. Therefore, take your time to review all your options. If you need help, connect with a company specializing in report automation.