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4 Golden Ways to Build Rich Data Reports.

Sep 9, 2019Analytics, Field Merchandising Software

21st century digital data capture solutions have radically changed the process of capturing and reporting data. Old methods saw organizations devoting massive amounts of time and resources to producing and maintaining paper records. With the revolution of digital data capture solutions the paper headache has finally been quelled, no longer are there papers that can be lost or physical space required to store it. Digital data capture solutions provide organizations with many benefits from time, money and resources savings to automation and efficiency.

In this article, I would like to speak to the point of automating processes specifically data reporting and analysis. Data reporting is the process of collating data into meaningful summaries that allow for monitoring of business performance. Analysis is the process of using this information to identify meaningful insights that will allow key decision-makers to leverage these insights and further understand and improve business performance.

Collected data plays an integral part of the reporting and analysis process. Poor quality data will result misleading reports and misinformed business decisions. Therefore it is of utmost importance that the data collection process is designed in a way that reduces error, collects the key attributes, categorizes data and produces a uniform result-set to report on. This allows organizations to build historical data that is uniform and comparable throughout its lifetime; essentially building a “rich data” database.

 

 

SO WHAT IS RICH DATA? 

Rich data simply means that there is more quality data available compared to the needs of the data consumers; it is the process of compiling data into business intelligence that help answer specific questions about a business’s markets by linking other information available from other areas of the business to create a broader image of the organization. For example, marketing teams would appreciate use of contact details of clients to communicate marketing content whilst the sales team is primarily concerned with what products are being sold; This creates the need for data richness, if data is rich we can aggregate the data from sales and marketing to come to conclusions such as more products were sold when marketing ran campaign X.

START BUILDING DATA RICH REPORTS WITH FIGJAM 

Overview.

The team at FIGJAM has spent more than half a decade working out the best way to help businesses build rich data and report on it. Here are our top 4 ways of doing this:

 

1. Use upload templates

FIGJAM has developed specific templates for uploading data into the FIGJAM portal. We believe we have all the necessary input fields on each template to produce a concise rich dataset that will allow organisations to drill down into the data from the FIGJAM portal. For example, on uploading ‘Store Information’ to the FIGJAM portal our templates make the provision to list the suburb, city, and country of each client which then allow reporting to drill down on each of these fields relative to , for example, sales made. (eg) total sales for white rice made across northern region stores in Kenya.

2. Use custom forms

FIGJAM understands that a standardised system will not support all data-field variants. So  with this in mind FIGJAM offers a tool known as Custom Forms that allows clients to pre-define any additional data fields they would like to collect during client visits. This allows clients to collect any degree of variable data that may be useful to their organization and furthermore we can aggregate this data in a custom report (see No.4 below).

3. Use maps

Not only does FIGJAM want its users to collect accurate data, it also wants to give them confidence that it’s being done in the correct locations. FIGJAM supports this is by geo-tagging jobs done using the app which allows the aggregation of GPS (global positioning system) data and job data (Orders, Stock takes, photos, etc). Management can now view a geographical break down of what was done where; additionally geographical data opens the door to further benefits such as delivery route planning based on GPS coordinates.

4. Get custom reporting

FIGJAM offers custom reporting that allows organisations to receive summarised reports on clients’ data based on the organisations’ needs. FIGJAM understands that there are benefits that can be achieved through custom reporting using rich data. Graphical representation of large, complex data sets is not easy. FIGJAM specialises in helping organisations make sense of all their data in concise meaningful custom reports.

 

So in summary, if you’re a business owner, manager or head of department, start making your organisation richer by ensuring its key business decisions are being based on meaningful reports generated using accurate real-time rich data-sets.