The Time Eater: Reporting in Seconds, not Days
If there’s one thing that all superheroes have in common it’s timing. Seconds before a crash, moments before an explosion, and in the twinkling of an eye, a crisis is averted. In this installment of our series, The Superpowers that Create Data Heroes, we are going deeper into the criticality of time and timing. When it comes to analytical reporting, we find our next reporting villain: the insidious Time Eater.
The Villains of Bad Reporting: The Time Eater
The Time Eater is tricky because it appears in so many areas of reporting:
- Design. The amount of time it takes to create a report. (In this regard, The Time Eater often forms a nasty alliance with another dastardly villain (“The Programming Pig!”)
- Customization. Not just the time it takes to modify a report, but the amount of time it takes to modify a single analytical component – such as ‘gross profit’ – across the numerous reports that use it. (“The Truth Hider”)
- Processing. The most obvious culprit; the minutes or hours that reports take to run. These hungry hogs impact your IT resources and are related to your transactional data. (“The Data Monster”.)
- Distribution. A report has value only once it’s been reviewed and acted on by the right people – and getting those reports to the right people at the right time is too often a slow, manual process.
- Deployment. Derailing many reporting projects before they even start, the Time Eater can consume weeks or months before letting you get analytics up-and-running. This is the #1 reason why so many organizations never even attempt a BI initiative.
As a data superhero who needs to fight the tactics of The Time Eater, you need to equip your virtual utility belt with a wide range of retaliatory tools – all of which are provided via DataSelf’s BI-based Reporting™.
Starting with Design Time . . . since you design only those reports you need, DataSelf includes the largest library of pre-configured reports, dashboards, and KPIs. Roughly 80% of all needed reports are included out-of-the-box which gives you plenty of time to create those reports that are truly custom for your organization. What’s more, DataSelf offers “no code / low code / full code” customization options, enabling you to customize reports quickly and easily.
The battle against Customization Time is a numbers game. The Time Eater wins when a simple change to your analytics requires individually changing numerous reports. YOU win when you define standard formulas on DataSelf’s centralized server — making any required changes . . . once . . . for all applicable reports.
DataSelf’s ETL+ Data Warehousing™ is your weapon of choice against the villainies of Processing Time. By transforming transactional databases (like ERP & CRM) into lean, mean, data machines, ETL+ produces your reports in ten seconds or less – even those ‘overnight’ reports that used to take hours.
And yet . . . virtually instantaneous reporting can still be bedeviled by the devious delaying tactic of Distribution Time. But with DataSelf’s self-service report distribution module on their virtual utility belt, users can schedule their own delivery of reports — without having to ask someone else for assistance.
This brings us to the last – and most powerful – weapon in The Time Eater’s arsenal: Deployment Time. The mere threat of its consumption of countless hours is daunting. But with DataSelf, the countless becomes countable – with a guaranteed deployment of BI-based Reporting in under 24 hours.
The Time Eater is probably the most difficult reporting villain because there are so many time-devouring weapons at its disposal. As a data superhero, you have to bring all your superpowers to bear on this arch-villain. DataSelf gives you those powers and proves once and for all that “timing is everything”.
Learn more about BI-based reporting and ETL+ Data Warehousing.
