A suggested framework for implementing a successful reporting solution
Teri-Leigh Peach
Dynamic senior level marketing consultant helping businesses grow their brand, stand out against their competition and develop robust strategies that bring new sales to their business.
Whether your business is a for profit or non-profit organisation it can benefit from access to meaningful information and insights that help users manage and improve what they do.
Nearly all businesses exist to achieve a desired outcome. This may be profit and shareholders return, in the case of profit businesses, or lives changed and impacted in the case of non-profit organisations.
By managing and optimizing performance across strategic business activities a business is able to achieve their desired outcomes. Accessing meaningful information and insights for these activities helps a business know what is happening, understand who or what is affecting their performance and identify what can be done about it.
Below is a suggested framework for developing and implementing a reporting solution for your business.
Once you have defined the desired outcome/s that your business would like to achieve, you can use the framework as follows:
1.Define and collect data for the key business activities your business needs to manage and optimize to achieve your overall outcome. This may be primary business activities such as; marketing, sales, operations, logistics and supporting services or related business activities such as acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers or increasing stock turnover – by way of example.
2.Define how you will measure performance for these key business activities. This could be one of the following types of measures:
·Effectiveness – are we achieving desired results, for example Rand value sales?
·Efficiency – are we achieving our desired results with the least amount of time, effort or resource? For example; Gross Profit % or Sales per Square meter.
·Risk – are we achieving desired results with the lowest likelihood of write off or loss? For example; stock written off or bad debts.
·Customer experience – did we meet a client’s needs and wants while achieving our desired results? Clients have both functional and emotional needs, for example; did they get what they wanted and how did we make them feel?
·Adherence to standards – did we maintain standards while meeting their needs? For example; store signage, cleanliness etc.
A scorecard can also be used to measure performance across 2 or more of the above measures. This ensures that one performance measure is not favored to the detriment of another. For example, a business can make credit sales but have a high level of bad debt.
3.Define how you will determine good and poor performance. It is important that you know how you are performing, in other words, are you meeting your strategic objectives or not? Good and bad performance can be defined as performance against; a target/budget, a threshold or a comparison to a prior period/s. A trend will also help you identify the direction of your performance over time.
4.Define who or what could affect your performance. By doing this for your business you gain better understanding about who or what is affecting your performance and it is a foundation for taking appropriate action to manage and improve performance. As a guideline this could be people, products, places, processes, promotions and related activities. However, this also provides a real opportunity for you to differentiate your business by understanding what is affecting your preferences and could include customers/prospective customers behavior and preferences. For example, what attracts customers into a store, how long do they spend in your store, what are they interested in and how many do you convert to sales.
5.Define who, when and how users need access to information and insights so that they can take appropriate action. It is important that users who can make decisions and influence performance have access to the right information at the right time. For example, is one branch performing a lot worse than comparable stores, what is affecting their performance and what can they do about it?
Over the next series of blogs on the Summit Solutions website, we will look at more examples in depth for different business activities and processes.
Summit Solutions -Data & Reporting Specialists