This is second in a series of contributions from UK-based consultant Grant Perkins. Today Grant offers some sweet ways to enhance your contribution to your organization.
How many times have you been asked to provide some information or an analysis from a new source and thought: “I have all that in my old sources”?
How many times have you thought, “They won’t listen, but I could really give my bosses something useful here that would help me AND help them”?
Maybe they won’t know to ask and maybe they don’t like to be told. So, for everyone’s benefit, is there a way to allow them to ask for the information you know you can provide? What diversionary benefits can you present that guide them your way?
There are those who think – and this is by no means a new thought – that many businesses are failing to get the most, sometimes any, real benefit from their investment in the potential of their ERP and CRM systems.
From what I have seen over the years it is hard to disagree but that is not what I set out to discuss here. I think we all know that most business systems are able to offer more, by one means or another, than we use them for. But what can we get from them for no additional effort? Indeed can we get more for less? And if so can we make a pitch to the ‘upper levels’ that guides them to support your initiative by making the decision based on less ‘challenging’ questions that have an obvious and positive response?
One or two reports give all?
Some years ago I worked for a company that wrote and supported business software for service organizations, primarily the sort that sent technical people out on site visits to fix things.
The system we provided was modular and covered a lot of business operational territory. The core modules, common to just about all clients, managed their contract database equipment, locations, terms and conditions and recurring billing amounts in one module and their field activities, worker management, service level reporting, cost capture and some more billing opportunities in a second module. Some files were common between the two as you might expect. Mostly clients used both modules but not always to their full capability. Indeed it is probably safe to say that they were rarely used to their full capability.
We wrote hundreds of reports often with many and growing options for data selection and sort orders in an attempt to satisfy all the varieties of report ‘views’ individual clients perceived as ‘must haves’ without which they could not run their businesses. People still asked for report writers – despite some of the calculations being so complex to generate outside a piece of dedicated code that they had not a chance of getting it right. That potentially very bad news did not stop them trying though…
Having discovered Monarch – and with lots of greenbar reports to play with – I suddenly realized one day that all I needed to provide almost 100% of the information that most people wanted (or at least asked for) on a daily basis could be provided by Monarch from one of two system reports provided those reports were run for only date range selections and ignored all of the other complexity we had built into them. Even the date range selection was only required to pick relevant data – I could have taken the whole database (within reason) and used Monarch to do the individual analyses we were providing and distributing.
All the work to re-create the performance measures in other places was no longer required – the reports did that for me. Plus I could re-group and re-sort data any way I wanted it building up from the detail records or starting at more of a summary level to start with.
But the clients had, by then, already got what they thought they wanted. How would this be better?
Well to start with the existing processes were often specifically developed in house and required initial effort and continuing maintenance and support. So I could pitch a cost saving and process risk reduction by making it all simpler.
Secondly all of the overnight extractions for the reports used a lot of processing time (as did the printing using processing and, back then, paper). User run reports during the day could be even more disruptive. Running 2 reports with simple selection criteria (dates) was faster and reduced the overhead and for many needs eliminated the idea of the users running their own reports. We could move that task off the main server and on to the Office PC network, using Monarch (or, these days, perhaps a Data Pump server) to produce the outputs from the re-analysis of the overnight extraction.
So the argument would be for doing more for less. A small investment in a Monarch based front end would save recurring amounts in the server farm investment and operation. Would that be an easier proposition for the decision makers to understand? That was the primary benefit. The secondary benefit (but primary for you!) was how much more analysis you could offer as the sugar on the dessert.
So, two reports to get it all. But to see the full potential you may need to be at least aware of the potential capabilities of all the Monarch tools that allow you to tickle data out from even the less obvious routes – more to come on some of those subjects …..
When he’s not experimenting with traps and templates Grant enjoys a good coffee along with an occasional treat, all the while dreaming up new ways to excel with Monarch.
