From Push to Pull Reporting

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Email boxes are overloaded with all kind of reports, making people stressed out. Both report sender (as they committed themselves getting this report done) and report receivers (as their email box is exploding) are spending a lot of time on the total process of these reports. How can this be organised in a more efficient and more effective way and still be productive?

The definition of a report is a document which contains information organized in a narrative, graphic, or tabular form, prepared on ad hoc, periodic, recurring, regular, or as required basis. Reports may refer to specific periods, events, occurrences, or subjects, and may be communicated or presented in oral or written form. Basically reports provide information, but even more importantly reports need to trigger next steps or actions.

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Too many times you probably have seen that reports are written/drawn up for the sake of producing reports and nothing is done with the information, if it is being examined by the receiver at all. It looks like a mechanism of having control instead of being in control. Your colleagues are probably managing the results instead of the process, managing the outcome instead of the actions that lead to the results. I once had to prepare some results in US dollars instead of our usual currency, the Euro's. When this report was done the manager looked at it and gave the feedback that it was nice to know how the results looked in another currency. Why did we ever make this report and what were the actions? You probably guessed it - none, but it was time consuming to produce the report, for sure.

Don't get me wrong, reports are crucial to steer your organisation towards your goals. The point I am trying to make here is to get this process as efficient and as effective as possible, because probably a lot of time and effort is spent on them.

The solution for this is to change the company's mind-set to switch from push to pull information. The report user needs to pull his or her information without great effort and within a limited amount of time instead of someone within the organisation pushing this and bombarding email boxes with this data while stressing all involved. Especially during the implementation of ERP and CRM systems, these risks are easily forgotten and make the organisation even more stressful besides the stress the implementation is already causing. The goal needs to be to ensure your employees need to have access to the right information at the right time without to much effort.

To make this work of course all the IT tools need to be in place. Technically (as in hardware, data lines etc.) it need to be available as well as functionally, meaning reports need to be placed technically connected to the relevant database making information accessible for the report user. When reports are in place new insight from employees will trigger a continuous improvement process, giving the report more added value. But eventually it will save time for the entire organisation, making your organisation proactive instead of reactive which in the long term of course will make your organisation more profitable.

For example I have seen internal sales account managers shifting their work from minimising report making to proactive using their reports to engage customers and driving more sales.

Conclusion:

To be honest it takes a lot of effort to pull these pull reports together. It usually means that a project needs to be started next to the daily work to make it work and this isn't always first priority. However when this is executed correctly it will de-stress your organisation, turning the mind-set of your organisation in a proactive one with data always up to date and of course correct (see my earlier blog "The Effect of Wrong Information" on this on my website).

To give you an example at the beginning of one of my project the preparation of quarter end results took almost three weeks in preparation with a lot of overtime. At the end almost one year later these reports were created instantly, making them available for the management when they were able to review them. All of this also made the team who used to prepare these reports analysing data instead of merely processing data.

Which would you rather have them doing?

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