Establish BI, Analytics, Reporting Center of Excellence (CoE)
The business performance suffers as leaders make ineffective decisions using inconsistent and inaccurate reports. Establish a reporting center of excellence for excellent business intelligent management and effective business decision making.
The business performance of Sears suffers as business leaders make ineffective decisions using reports that are inconsistent and inaccurate. On a daily basis, business leaders spend more time debating on data accuracy than making sound decisions.
Project Goal
To help business leaders make effective decisions, create consistent, trustworthy, useful and user-friendly reporting solution. Establish BI, Analytics, Reporting Center of Excellence (CoE) for effective business reproting management.
Causes
After further investigation, reporting issues were due to the following reasons:
• Reporting teams are working in silos without commonly agreed data retrieval, data clean up, and data consolidation process causing reporting inconsistency and inaccuracy.
• Reporting method, logic, and model not validated to ensure reporting quality.
• Reporting databases developed and managed by engineer team with the sole purpose to keep a data replica of production database making useful data points unavailable or not suitable for reporting purposes.
• Engineer teams not responsible for data processing and reporting result in delayed response to a major crisis such as batch job failure and database crashes.
• Frequent job delays and database failure further exacerbates the slow leadership team decision-making process.
• Lack of standard reporting and database documentation causing unproductive and inconsistent in generating reports and onboard analytics.
• Systems and databases not fully integrated result in analysts query different databases when creating reports. The situation slows down the report generation speed.
• Real-time reporting capability not available to help monitor business performance in real time.
• Reports are mostly manually generated than automated result in high operation overhead and reduce business sales revenue.
Solution
(1) Reconcile key reports to improve reporting accuracy and reliability to regain trust from leadership teams.
a. Re-evaluate reporting models to ensure reporting accuracy
b. Create documentation of reports for self-serve user and analytics onboarding process. Gather and track reporting user feedback to monitor the progress of reconciliation effort
(2) Generate a single source of truth reporting database by migrating history data to the reporting database, create real-time data pipeline from application databases into the reporting database, and denormalize data tables in the centralized reporting database to expedite reporting generation speed and generate more meaningful and relevant reports. For example, in the past executives can only see how revenue in sales changes throughout history, but now executives will be able to learn about how sales vary by customer demographic.
(3) Retire manual reports. Convert and automate only useful reports into digital dashboards. The practice reduced resource waste, so these people are freed to perform creative and strategic tasks such as improving the reporting process and making reports more meaningful and robust.
(4) Create a centralized reporting team to oversee the reporting activity of business teams to ensure persistent reporting quality and oversee day-to-day reporting operation
(5) People management/change management to support project effort and onboard to a new platform.
Project discovery & solution Process:
Immediately after I joined the online business unit, to get myself familiar with the business and generate immediate business results, I met up with 93 colleagues to learn about the company and discover gaps. During the process, I asked below questions:
• What do you do?
• What is your work process? Why we follow this process?
• How you contribute to the business as a whole with what you do?
• How long have you been with the company?
• What keep you up in the night? What are some of the pain points with what you do, your business organization, and the company as a whole?
• What can we do to resolve the issues we are facing?
With 107 issues recorded after the discussion. I was able to categorize these issues into main themes as below:
• Improve reporting & decision making
• Improve communication
• Better project budgeting, status reporting, and prioritization
• Better address customer feedback
• SEO – make online items more searchable
• Change organization structure for more efficient operation
• Improve logistics management (Inventory Management/Distribution Center/Order return and refund)
Among all the main themes, Reporting & Decision-making ranked the top one concern across all businesses. 80% of the reporting users complain about it. However, over the past at least ten years, improving reporting was never brought up as a company-wide initiative. Most of the people in the company regarded reporting as an operational effort lacked revenue impact. It was not exciting to the business leaders who focused on finding the next technological breakthrough to turn the business around. Notably, the reporting effort will not develop new features to wow our customers. Furthermore, with the high turnover rate and minimal documentation, people within the company lack of company overall reporting knowledge to take on an initiative of this level of impact. Limited by the existing database infrastructure, no one at the time even thought of solving reporting issue a possibility.
Though challenging, solving the reporting and decision-making has both short-term and long-term business benefits. The short term and immediate return of investment (ROI) is resource and infrastructure cost reduction. When we free our employees from manually generating reports and redesign our infrastructure to use open source databases paired with virtual machines and cloud storages we will significantly reduce our operational cost. These operational cost saving will positively impact net profit. In the long run, when a business can accurately gauge business performance and make effective decisions, our company will generate more revenue and avoid costly mistakes.