What if I told you that if you build a data Warehouse you will increase the efficiency of your company saving you money and time?
You heard it right. You can increase your efficiency, or rather, decrease mundane and worthless tasks that your team is doing in order to do reporting. What kind of reporting? Well, pretty much anything they do should be measured or reported otherwise how can you improve? How do you know you are doing better now than before? If you don’t measure it, it may not be worth doing.
But reporting comes with its own challenges. Mainly the days of copying and pasting are over. I mean, it used to be easy to walk down the hall and ask “IT” for the report in Excel. You would then receive the email with these week’s numbers and go at it with all the pivoting and conditional formatting you could muster.
You pick a few charts and you save it on your desktop and you send it to your team via email. You would then get a few email replies stating that the data for a specific product is incorrect, that our chart is measuring the wrong thing and you forgot to select this other column that is why the SUM is not matching the total. Some of your colleagues would even be nice enough to correct the formulas or complement your spreadsheet and send it back to you thinking that you would magically know what changes they did. Anyway, they changed the entire color scheme of the conditional formatting because it was cooler in red and blue and not orange and green.
That is when you turn to IT to save the day and ask them to standardize reporting for you. Let’s set up a project to build a data warehouse and standardize all of our systems and after some hires and purchase of thousands of dollars in software licenses and servers we can get you a state of the art data warehouse that you – the person requesting it in the first place – will not have access to change or modify unless you go through IT, or rather the consultant currently writing reports.
So you go back to doing our own cooking in Excel because the new system is really not what you wanted, it is slow, just as wrong at times as you were with your own Excel calculations and you end up exporting the data anyway.
This is, unfortunately, the truth in many companies that have the need for more than a single sheet Excel.
Let’s take on a simple example of a small company that has 1 person responsible for consolidating data and building a spreadsheet (Excel or some other tool) every week on their laptop. This person gathers data from an invoice system, a simple eCommerce/Web site sales system and another spreadsheet that contains expense data. Three data sources that are not connected. The process of gathering the data from the 3 different systems involves some type of report that you set parameters and export to – you guessed it – a spreadsheet.
This person has 4 or 5 spreadsheets and starts doing some pivoting around, some filtering and cleaning up on each and puts it all together on a “Master” spreadsheet that combines specific data from each. This Master spreadsheet becomes your central focus, and you continue to improve it and make it a serious focus of your weekly reporting process.
