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How to automate reporting (and say goodbye to Excel)

EducationSummary: The process of taking data out of an enterprise system and turning it into meaningful management information is a challenge for many businesses. It usually requires Excel, and hours of manual work. Would you like to automate that process, and eliminate the clunky Excel reporting once and for all? Learn how one company fixed this very problem.

Let me ask you a question: How quickly can you pull data out of your system? How quickly can you turn data into meaningful management information?

Minutes? Hours? Days?

For many businesses, it’s a complicated process that involves Excel. Their enterprise systems don’t offer adequate reporting. To turn their data into meaningful management information, they must:

  • Export data to Excel,
  • manipulate the data in Excel,
  • create reports and graphs using the data, and
  • email their spreadsheet to those who need the reports.

This process takes hours or days depending on the data. The worst part: You must repeat it every time you need a report. I’ve seen companies where an employee spends half of their time on this process.

Then, what happens when someone shares that spreadsheet? What if that person then alters the spreadsheet and shares it with someone else? Now you have multiple spreadsheet versions floating around. How do you know which one is accurate?

Wouldn’t you rather automate that process? Wouldn’t you rather have the reports you need at the push of a button?

Just imagine how that would help your company. No more waiting around for reports. No more clunky, time-consuming reporting processes. No more spreadsheets!

What’s the answer? Here’s a great story about a company that was facing this very question. What did they do? They found a way to deliver real-time reports directly to their users, all without spreadsheets! To learn more, you can read the whole story here.