Much if not all of the information in your daily, weekly or monthly reports will have been originated by a person, one who goes into a system and manually inputs a number.

Typically, that’s into a transaction system or a system of record – but not always, especially in the case of audits and compliance checking or short-term metrics of interest. In these cases, all too often, data is dumped in excel, noted on a Post-it note, or sent via email.

It’s odd to me that many modern BI and reporting systems with all the whizz, bang and sizzle of connecting together various data sources, mashing up and cleaning data don’t however provide a reliable, auditable and flexible multi-user data capture capability.

There are a few vendors who have spotted the gap. They have adopted a totally different way of looking at reporting and business management.

The transaction data provides us with the information on ‘what’ happened ‘where’. How many people did we serve in this location, what did we provide to them, how much did we spend, what was our staff numbers and salary costs, and these days; how many staff are currently not working due to COVID-19?

If you additionally support this with the ‘why’ it happened context you’ll have a complete real time picture that joins together goals, performance, compliance, activity and quality. Did we follow our standard operating procedure, did we fail to deliver adequate social distancing, did we produce and deliver a product or service to the right quality, did our customers feel well served?

By combing any type of data input and collection, including audit, policy, compliance and survey metrics, with the transaction data of BI reports this approach cleverly enables an incredibly easy way for people to track everything a virtual boardroom, team meeting, inspector or individual needs to prioritise, re-plan and decide on the best next actions. This joined-up information drives total quality management more quickly, finding and fixing the causes of issues, and improving results.

This capability, whilst seeming blindingly obvious, adds dramatic user flexibility and ensures any data captured can be rolled up into aggregated risk, project, performance and governance structures to improve speed and effectiveness of decision-making with no additional effort.

So, I say, ditch copy and paste errors, chasing emails and producing endless collations for reporting and instead create a seamless unified platform to manage your business and remote working teams.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.