Enterprise reporting provides business intelligence (BI) to the masses. It is designed for information consumers, people at all organisational levels and across all job functions in the organisation, and supply chain partners and customers.
Enterprise reporting is the most prevalent of the five styles of BI, encompassing a vast array of operational reporting directly from enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, as well as scorecards and dashboards of overall business performance.
The single, dominant characteristic of any enterprise reporting system is its ability to produce highly flexible report formats, so data can be presented in whatever form is most consumable to a wide range of information consumers. These people obtain their reports by accessing them on-demand through their Web browsers (Web-based reporting), and by receiving distributions pushed to them via e-mail or print delivery.
What truly differentiates enterprise reporting technologies revolves around four key areas.
1. Support for all forms of enterprise reports - From scorecards and dashboards at one extreme, all the way to operational reports at the other extreme, and the many variations in between.
Report writing products typically either can deliver operational reports well or can deliver scorecards and dashboards well - but not both. What is required is an advanced architecture designed to deliver both operational reports and scorecards and dashboards easily from a single platform. This allows users to develop the five common forms of enterprise reports that range from highly graphical scorecards and dashboards for executives to densely populated tabular operational reports for all personnel.
These include:
* Scorecards and dashboards for executives: These are designed to deliver maximum visual impact to the user in a format optimised for quick absorption. Since organisations need to convey key performance indicators (KPIs) based on a complete view of financial and operational data, scorecards have to extend far beyond summary-level information.
* Operational reports for all personnel: Most enterprise information dissemination is in the form of traditional operational reports. These time-tested reports display volumes of tabular data organised into a hierarchy of increasingly finer levels of detail.
* Classic business reports for business managers: These reports are usually optimised for on-screen viewing and allow the user to drill to deeper details and related reports. Classic business reports easily combine tables, graphs and freeform field layout to create unique presentations of summary and detailed data.
* Managed metrics reports for business unit leaders: The drive to manage business "by the numbers" and deliver predictable results has led to a renewed interest in corporate performance management (CPM). The cornerstone of CPM is the managed metrics report, which allows managers to track continually the status of business performance, including actual-to-planned comparisons, time series projections and process flow analyses. This can be achieved using thresholds and graphical indicators to show attainment of performance goals, trends over time and status checks to manage to the metrics or targets. These reports can also display correlations and projections to help anticipate future business performance.
* Invoices and statements for customers and partners: Invoices and statements contain detailed transactional data and summarised information for any number of customers and partners. This enterprise report form is designed with page layout precisely defined and report elements precisely formatted and positioned to ensure proper printing across multiple sheets and with pre-printed corporate stationery.
An enterprise reporting solution should be able to deliver all five common forms of enterprise reports with uniform ease.
2. User-defined Web reporting - Making enterprise reports more compelling, personalised and relevant for each person.
The single, dominant characteristic of any enterprise reporting system is its ability to produce highly flexible report format.
Charl Barnard, GM, MicroStrategy
The goal of every enterprise reporting project is to inspire people to use information in their day-to-day work activities. However, most projects fail to achieve this goal because the reports are not immediately relevant to each recipient user - that is, a user must sift through reams of numbers to find just the few sections that directly relate to their area of responsibility. The other reason reporting efforts fail to achieve their goals is that the enterprise reporting environment is not easily tuned to the diverse skills of a wide population of users - that is, the user interface is either too simple and appeals only to the most novice users, or it is too "feature-rich" and overpowers novice users.
This is a tough technical challenge and most BI products fail miserably because they do not give people enough control over the report contents and their enterprise reporting environment; neither do these products automatically tailor report content to fit the user`s interests and skill. This problem can be solved through four personalisation levels:
* Parameterised reporting to let the user define the report contents.
* Automatically customised content to allow one report to serve the needs of thousands of users automatically through role-based content.
* Personalised user interface based on user profile to match user interface functionality level with user skill level.
* Multilingual support to personalise reports to the local languages in which they are accessed.
3. High throughput report production and distribution - Reaching all users through the touchpoints of their choice and making reporting ubiquitous and convenient throughout the organisation.
Information consumers are everywhere. They are in executive offices, in office cubicles, on warehouse floors, at loading docks, at customer sites, at suppliers` offices, and in customers` homes. Effective enterprise reporting systems must be able to reach all of these users, wherever they are and with sufficient power to generate tens of thousands of reports per hour if needed.
Their architecture must support high volume, high flexibility report distribution, with the ability to automatically distribute reports to the widest range of user touchpoints on the market, including Web browsers, networked printers, e-mail, networked file servers and corporate portals.
4. Pixel-perfect and print-perfect design without any programming - Making desktop publishing quality reports available without any programming.
Typical report writing products are optimised for either on-screen presentation or for print generation, but not both. Moreover, many of these report writers require extensive programming to deliver all but the most rudimentary reports.
An enterprise reporting tool should instead deliver pixel-perfect reports for on-screen presentation, as well as print-perfect reports for physical distribution, letting users create desktop publishing quality documents for either media.
What`s even more important is for users to be able to do this without the need for any programming or outside help - it is all drag-and-drop.
Finally, enterprise reporting technology should provide the most comprehensive and flexible reporting capabilities to enable users to move fluidly from scorecarding and basic operational reporting to ever-increasing levels of analysis.
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