Tiny little business intelligence report

Bureaucracy is never-ending source of crazy tasks. Here is the case of one small task, business has to generate small report on push the button for the official external reporting purposes. At first glance nothing is wrong with the task coming from certain department that report has to be implemented somewhere in company information systems. Nothing weird…

Well, this tiny little report contains mixture of non financial and financial KPI’s. It is the mixture of EBITDA, ROCE, EBIT, physical capacity of network, number of employees, number of whatever.

First catch is where to place this “little report”. Into Data Warehouse, into Financial and Controlling Business Intelligence, in ERP…? Where?

If it is placed into DWH it means certain amount of data that DWH does not have has to be imported into it like financial figures (EBITDA, EBIT, ROCE and similar). There would be nothing wrong with input from production systems, but Financial and Controlling Business Intelligence is not production system, nor is Business Performance Management. It would mean to go step back to join non financial figures that Data Warehouse contains together with confidential financial figures that are generated in specialized Business Intelligence solutions.

Is FCBI or BPM proper place to join all requested figures. Usually yes but this tiny little report contains figures that are not management figures, not of their high interest and this means that those non financial figures from operative reporting from sales and technique are not in FCBI or BPM. It would mean to significantly enlarge current data flow from DWH to FCBI and BPM.

Well, is there any other solution?

There is no easy solution fro report containing operative non financial figures and highly agregated financial figures. Perhaps the best approach would be to thoroughly analyze who from bureaucracy created such innocent task, for what purpose, according to which recommendations and similar.

Benefits and damages of making such report must be analyzed. 

Related posts, articles and documents:

• How to Make Specifications for Business Intelligence Reports
• Fall and raise of Reporting
• ERP reporting and DWH/BI
• Some thoughts about data quality in reporting
• Thin line between legacy reports and DWH/BI reporting