Emburse Analytics Pro is a powerful tool for answering questions about your organization's data. Whether you are just beginning to use Emburse Analytics Pro or want to reevaluate your existing Emburse Analytics Pro setup, these best practices will help you maximize the value of your data.
Review Current Reporting Processes and Outcomes with Stakeholders
Understanding the data needs of the stakeholders is key to a successful outcome. We recommend staying away from what is on each existing report and instead uncover why each report is run and what outcomes it ultimately supports.
First, collect your stakeholders and identify all reports run today. Then, ask these questions about each existing standard, ad hoc, or customer report in use to uncover the true desired outcomes.
- Who is the audience?
- How often does this audience receive this information?
- How often does this audience need this information?
- How does the audience receive the information? (Is it manual or scheduled?)
- What is the main business purpose for which this report was built originally?
- What questions is the audience hoping to answer with this report?
- Are there any other uses or audiences for this report beyond the original scope that need to be accounted for?
- Does the raw output of the report fully satisfy the original business question it was built to answer in its current state? Or are there subsequent steps necessary to transform, merge, sort, filter clean, email, etc. the data?
- Tip: Request a copy of the final outcome of these reports.
Learn About the Desired Outcome of the Report, Not the Data
As you are taking inventory, consider that many reports in use today are the first step in a larger process to merge, manipulate, clean, build visualizations, and finally deliver data to the stakeholder. Others are used to sort, filter, and isolate specific data that requires action. Those reports and processes are where some of the largest innovation opportunities are hiding.
During the review process, it may be necessary to ask these questions several times before the true desired outcome is revealed. Emburse Analytics Pro has the potential to produce and deliver the true desired outcome to each stakeholder and eliminate many of those individual reports that were previously created to support the desired outcome.
Optimize Your Dashboards
- Use dashboards to replace flat file downloads that produce spend and processing trends and performance analysis, general KPIs, and metrics for admins, approvers, business leaders, project leaders, etc.
- As you’re designing your organization's strategy, be sure to define and build a set of companywide spend and processing goals and metrics, then use those prebuilt tiles in all dashboards for consistency.
- Incorporate goals and expectations directly into the dashboard to provide users more context.
- Consolidate all the aggregates, trends, and metrics each stakeholder needs for day-to-day activities in one dashboard.
Identify and Remove Unnecessary Reports and Processes
With multiple stakeholders from different areas of the business requesting data, we frequently see that over time there can be a buildup of very similar reports. These all require separate maintenance and support, which leads to redundant efforts that can be eliminated easily. Understanding the desired outcomes for each request for data will reveal those redundancies.