The Ad Hoc Reporting Resource

« Top-ten Musts of Ad Hoc Reporting | Main | Embedding ad hoc reporting: the benefits »

January 9, 2009

How Ad Hoc Reporting Software Can Save the Day

In this time of recession, ad hoc reporting software can give a company the shot in the arm it needs to become more competitive in the short term.

What Is Ad Hoc Reporting?
In business intelligence, Ad hoc reporting (or adhoc reporting, as some spell it) is nothing but reporting and analysis capability given to the end-user. As opposed to its "managed" counterpart, ad hoc reporting does not call for a developer preparing the report. Each end user can prepare his own report "ad hoc" (Latin for "on a case-by-case basis", or "for that specific purpose") for the problems he has to solve.

Benefits of Ad Hoc Reporting
The main benefit of ad hoc reporting is that it frees the business end-user to report on and analyze data without waiting for IT to prepare queries for him. In these tough economic times, when most companies operate on a minimal crew and everyone's job is unique, this type of flexibility is even more precious.

But even in general, ad hoc reporting is all about empowering decision-makers to get to know their business better and act as entrepreneurs to solve their problems quickly and efficiently, without the bottleneck of report-development needing to be performed by another department.

Sales, account management, finance, operations, warehousing, planning, human resources--all functions within a company can benefit from ad hoc reporting.

Drawbacks of Ad Hoc Reporting
As we all know (or should), with freedom comes responsibility. And without responsibility, an excess of freedom can cause problems. In this case, managed reporting gives a company more control over how data is analyzed, since a professional report developer prepares the queries along (one would hope) standardized and agreed-upon guidelines.

Also, allowing the end-user to query the operational databases directly can cause some technical headaches. This is why the better ad-hoc reporting software includes a meta database that effectively insulates the company's data from the ad hoc reporting by end-users.

Practical Examples of How Ad Hoc Reporting Software Can Help
Let's say that you are a company with 100 salesmen operating in 100 different territories nationwide. Would you want each salesman to have full access to his own numbers, goals, clients' history--and even human resources file? If so, ad hoc reporting is the answer. With only a few user-based security measures in place (so that, for instance, Jones cannot see Smith's salary history and vice-versa), ad hoc reporting software can offer each salesman access to the critical numbers to make his job more efficient.

With the better ad hoc reporting solutions, salesmen in our example could also place the most critical information on an user-created dashboard and receive an automatic report every morning informing them of the latest numbers.

This type of ad-hoc reporting capability would allow them not only to see the information that matters to each of them while tuning out distracting "white noise;" also, it would enable them to analyze data "how" they like--for example, some more visually, some other in a more table or number-oriented way.

The bottom line: with ad hoc reporting, you turn your employees into decision makers and empower them to become experts in their business without depending on somebody else.

Posted by The Ad Hoc Reporting Boys at January 9, 2009 12:15 PM

Comments

Posted by: Anethythymn at May 15, 2011 5:31 AM

Posted by: London escort at May 16, 2011 3:11 PM

Posted by: cheap London escort at May 17, 2011 12:06 AM

Posted by: Allegro at May 17, 2011 5:01 AM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: