When implementing enterprise systems, the report development scope resides in what might be thought of as something of a gray area, as reporting requirements typically never reside within just one group. Many reports are department or function centric, but the availability of integrated suites today often creates the need for many reports that cross departmental and functional boundaries. It is often times necessary to bridge these crossings as you identify existing reports and their owners / users, and assess the benefits of each report. In many cases, this analysis will reveal that some of the reports being generated are no longer needed, or are of minimal benefit to the organization.

The ‘easy’ solution is to replicate each of the existing reports, without regard to their current and future value to the organization, but this path is very time consuming and will require numerous resources that might be better applied elsewhere. We believe that a better solution is to review each report with a small cross functional team. While this may sound time intensive, independent studies, as well as our own experience have shown that as many as two-thirds of existing reports are not run after the initial request for data, or the report becomes obsolete as business processes and reporting requirements change. The reality is that report writing can become an opportunity for significant scope creep and cost if not tightly controlled.

Some of the questions that need to be addressed in the Report Development effort include the following:

P What additional reports will be required based on the new system and processes?
P How do you assess and prioritize the reporting needs? Are any operational or regulatory decisions based on the information generated by       the report?
P Do you run these reports in real time, or are batch runs sufficient to meet the needs of the business? How does the timing of these reports       align with interfaces that provide the data used to generate the reports?
P Will the reports be run against the production environment, tying up precious CPU resources, or should they be run against an image of the       production data?
P What tools will power-users employ to extract and view data, and who controls where and how that data will be extracted?

As the teams emerge from business process design and data conversion efforts, the timing is appropriate for identifying and developing reports in support of key performance indicators. Paying too little attention to report development can greatly undermine an organizations ability to demonstrate efficiency and reliability gains, including:

P Targeting areas for improvement;
P Viewing data not previously available;
P Monitoring new processes;
P Trending data;
P Reconciliation of various aspects of the Supply Chain and Procurement cycles; and
P Analyzing Preventative Maintenance (PM) data.

Trends in business today require the availability of KPI and other efficiency reports. In response to competitive, regulatory and customer pressures, organizations must report on increasing aspects of their business, and management relies heavily on reports to manage their operations.