Do Your Reports Service Your Organization? | Podcast

Reports should streamline decision-making, yet many organizations find themselves serving their reports instead of the other way around. In this episode of Weaver: Beyond the Numbers, Morgan Page explores how outdated reporting structures waste time, why data services are the key to efficiency and how businesses can shift from static reports to dynamic insights.

Key Points:

• Companies must reevaluate their data reporting methods to identify and eliminate inefficiencies in areas where employees spend substantial amounts of time transforming poorly composed reports into useful ones.
• The introduction of a data service system and a data governance program can enable organizations to answer critical business queries swiftly and accurately, enhancing operational efficiency.
• By allowing data to work for you, businesses can significantly reduce time spent on data search and analysis, fostering quick, informed decision-making and boosting business profitability.

Companies often generate reports that fall short of delivering the required insight because they have outgrown the original purpose of the report. To compensate, employees spend vital hours reformatting these reports in Excel to glean the necessary data. Each week, employees could spend up to nine hours on report reformatting, which equals one full workday for every five employees in a department.

This workforce inefficiency can be eliminated by introducing data governance and data service systems. Businesses must differentiate between reports for universal understanding, like income statements, and reports for operational purposes — what Morgan refers to as data analysis, designed to answer specific business questions. Morgan said, “Reports should work for you — not the other way around. A shift to self-service data enables faster, smarter decision-making.”

By creating a system that brings the required information to the fingertips of the workers, businesses can foster quick decision-making, thereby improving efficiency and profitability. No more getting bogged down in data aggregation and report generation. Let the data work for you, not the other way around.

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