Techie Stuff

Effective Performance Management means asking 3 key questions:

1. How are we doing?
2. Why is performance what it is?
3. What should we be doing?

Reporting and Analysis addresses questions 1 & 2 above. Question 3 is addressed by Planning and Forecasting

Drive performance with tools and reports that everyone in the business can access

Powerful, flexible reporting with self service capability is a key part of Performace Management systems. A typical implementation is likely to include dashboard(s) and key reports presented together to give an instant overview of operational performance. Well designed dashboards will highlight good & bad performance, have links to permit drill-through to more detailed data, as well as reporting KPI's.

We have many years of "real world" experience of delivering systems involving dashboards and other reports with drill-through features for greater analysis. Experience has shown us how important it can be to combine data from multiple sources to create "added value" reporting. For example, combining sales and labour information can quickly provide insight into staffing levels, labour percentages etc.

These days, it's not always necessary to create a "data warehouse" as modern performance management tools (such as those from IBM Cognos) can access the data "in place" and combine it for reporting purposes.

An approach we commonly use for this is to create "cubes" to consolidate and combine data. These provide benefits in terms of reporting speed, analysis capability and flexibility. IBM Cognos tools have capabilities to create "in memory" cubes (IBM Cognos Express) or "PowerCubes" (IBM Cognos BI).

IBM Cognos Tools
IBM Cognos BI & IBM Cognos Express both provide a comprehensive reporting and analysis capability as part of their Information Management toolset. Powerful reporting capability, extensive chart formats (including micro charts, gauges etc), the ability to combine data from several sources and flexible drill-through and analysis capability mean that virtually any reports can be created using these tools.

Most reports can be scheduled to refresh at fixed times or triggered by external events such as data updates.

Microsoft tools
Alternatively SQL Server Reporting Services (provided as part of Microsoft SQL Server) can be used to build standard reports and dashboards. Using the Visual Studio IDE, users with the relevant permissions can create reports containing the various graphs and tables that a traditional dashboard authoring tool would provide as well as enabling automated report circulation and export to popular formats such as PDF or XLS. SSRS requires an IIS 5.0 (or higher) web-server with the ASP.NET framework available.