Crystal Reports Administration: Increase Reporting System Value

Whether your reporting system is an afterthought add-on or a major IT investment, you need to look at ways to increase its value to the organization. Doing so will benefit your company and increase your value as an employee.

The typical reporting system underserves its users. The more you see Excel spreadsheets being used on reports or their data source, the more likely this is the case. The driving factor for the organization is the business need. For most reporting systems, meeting business needs is coincidental.

To determine where your reporting system is, conduct two simple polls three weeks apart. The time difference will help prevent people from correlating the two polls, thus increasing the accuracy of the conclusions you can draw.

Poll #1

In this poll, ask what information people need. Ask no more than half a dozen questions. Tailor at least a couple of them them to the department the person is in, and make the rest apply generally. Examples of what to ask include:

• What information about (our scrap rates, our customer demographics, our warranty issues) do you think is valuable in helping you (reduce waste, increase sales, reduce defects)?
• What information do you think is valuable in helping you increase your personal productivity?
• What information do you think is valuable in helping you increase your department's productivity?
• What information do you think is valuable in helping you decrease your department's costs?
• What information do you think is valuable in helping you manage risk?

A variation is to tailor this to what is achievable from your current database. Examples include:

• Is knowing the dollar value of our top ten customers important to you? How so?
• Is knowing our top ten customer service complaints useful? How so?
• Does the aggregate profit per sales account matter to you? In what way?
• Is the cost of each downtime incident valuable information to you? Of what use is this information?
• Does a comparison of downtime causes by cost have value to you? In what way?

Poll #2

This poll is designed to see how satisfied people are with the reporting system. You can design it any of several ways, for example:

• Use the results of the first poll to form the questions for the second. "Does our reporting system give you the information you need to increase your personal productivity?"
• Use the current report(s) to form the basis for the second poll. Ask what should be kept, dropped, and added.
• Ask, "Assuming we have the data from which to draw the report, what three things would be most important for you to have in a report each week?

Try to keep your polls light and simple, so you don't raise expectations and get yourself boxed into unspoken promises you can't possibly deliver. Don't ask leading questions to justify what you've already done. Ask probing questions to see what needs to be done.

Unless you are a qualified poll designer, the results will have a large margin of error. If a poll provides inaccurate results, why bother with it? Here are some reasons:

• The mere fact that you ask shows you care about the reporting system. This helps you at review time.
• The results will help you to identify some gaps for further exploration. You'll get a feel for where your system needs improvement.
• You have a factual basis for talking with management about a more formal process for upgrading the reporting system. This is much better than just spouting uninformed opinion.
• You are likely to discover some easy deliverables. An easy way to score points.

The danger in this exercise is that you'll stray from the high-return activities that give the most bang for the buck, and instead try to please people by providing them with what they tell you they want. For best results, stick with the business mission.

Here's a tip that will help you select the right things to put in reports. Think in terms of resume bullet points, where you can say something like, "Updated sales reporting system after thorough research, contributing to a 16% profit increase that year." Is it self-serving to think that way? If you asked your boss to choose between flat growth and a 16% profit increase in any given year, what do you think the answer would be?

A good reporting system isn't about giving users more data to manipulate in Excel. It's about providing the information that people can use to drive costs down and revenue up. If you hold your reporting system to that standard, both it and you will be extremely valuable to your organization.

This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.