Reporting & Analytics

Benefits

By implementing an effective reporting and analytics system, a business can increase communication, productivity, accuracy as well as timeliness. This will aid in creating a sustainable environment where management can make thoughtful and informed decisions, in order to grow the business.

• Personalise
  
  Businesses collect customer data from many different channels, for example physical retail, e-commerce, and social media. By using data analytics to create comprehensive customer profiles from this data, businesses can then gain insights into customer behavior to provide a more personalised experience.
• Inform
  SMEs can use data analytics to guide business decisions but also minimise financial losses. Predictive analytics can also be used to suggest what could happen in response to changes to the business, and prescriptive analytics can indicate how the business should react to these changes.
• Streamline
  Organisations can improve operational efficiency through data analytics. For instance, gathering and analysing data about the supply chain can show where production delays or bottlenecks originate and help predict where future problems may arise. If a demand forecast shows that a specific supplier won’t be able to handle the volume required for the holiday season, then a SME could supplement or replace this supplier to avoid production delays.
• Mitigate Risk
  Risks are surely everywhere in business. They include customer or employee theft, but also uncollected receivables, employee safety, and legal liability. Data analytics can not only help an organisation understand risks but also take preventive measures.

Reporting and Analytics, what’s the difference?

One of the key differences between reporting and analytics is that, while a report involves organising data into summaries, analysis involves inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modelling these reports to gain insights for a specific purpose.

Knowing the difference between the two is essential to fully benefit from the potential of both, without missing out on key features of either one. Some of the key differences include:

• Reporting is done to show what is happening.
• Analytics explains why something is happening.
  
• Reporting is used to track business data at periodic intervals.
• Analytics is to gather insights for decision making.
• Reporting involves organising and presenting data in a way that is easy to consume.
• Analytics involves questioning, analysing and interpreting.
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What can it bring?

So, you know you want to use your data for improving visibility and making informed decisions about the future, but, what does that actually mean? What will you gain from such a system and what will you do with it?

A reporting and analytic system form EBS can bring multiple benefits and we have tried to collate these into an easy to understand list:

• Purpose
  
  Reporting involves extracting data from different sources within an organization and monitoring it to gain an understanding of the performance of the various functions. By linking data from across functions, it helps create a cross-channel view that facilitates comparison to understand data easily. Analysis is being able to interpret this data at a deeper level, interpreting it and providing recommendations on actions.
• The Specifics
  Reporting involves activities such as building, consolidating, organizing, configuring, formatting, and summarizing. It requires clean, raw data and reports that may be generated periodically, such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Analytics includes asking questions, examining, comparing, interpreting, and confirming. Enriching data with big data can help predict future trends as well.
• The Final Output
  In the case of reporting, outputs such as canned reports, dashboards, and alerts push information to users. Through analysis, analysts try to extract answers using business queries and present them in the form of ad hoc responses, insights, recommended actions, or a forecast. Understanding this key difference can help businesses leverage analytics better.
• People
  Reporting requires repetitive tasks that can be automated. It is often used by functional business heads who monitor specific business metrics. Analytics requires customization and therefore depends on data analysts and scientists. Also, it is used by business leaders to make data-driven decisions.
• Value Proposition
  This is like comparing apples to oranges. Both reporting and analytics serve a different purpose. By understanding the purpose and using them correctly, businesses can derive immense value from both.