We work on automobiles data. Analysts check manufacturers and models data, and update everything in our in-house tool. We receive information about 100 jobs from different manufacturers, and they send in their updates regarding car models, bikes, lights, heavies, etc. and different metrics for each, such as prices, technical specifications, or other options. My job is to assign these jobs to the analyst and maintain the final reports.
Reports include such information as turn around time, the productivity of an analyst, jobs completed, received, work in process, awaiting QC, how many jobs are outstanding, how many jobs are due today, errors, projection for next week, volume analysis, error dashboard, time utilization report, weekly summary, production hours, SLA’s report, etc.
What tool can help us do a better job collecting, collating, analyzing, and producing these reports?
The image is what the clients are using as their workflow and is accessible to the managers. The tool should be accessible by everyone, both analysts, managers, and clients, has charts and pivots. The Excel file is a sample data.
We get that question often and we use PowerPoint for this reporting, since PowerPoint is great for making presentations and displaying relevant information. You don’t need that raw data. That is for databases.
You need a clean presentation design where you immediately see what is happening, what your targets are, trends and so on.
We have a tool called DataPoint which is an add-on for PowerPoint to link and display data. It will update the slides (tables, text boxes, charts etc) a) when you open the presentation, and better b) continuously when you run the slideshow.
So to speak, your running PowerPoint presentations become an information screen with real-time information.
Also important is our data scrolling feature. You have 100s of projects or products to report on. Just create on slide in PowerPoint and link it to the first data row. Then activate data scrolling and generate a snapshot presentation out of it. The result of this generation process, is a new PowerPoint with 100s of slides. 1 slide per project or product that you have to cover. All with their latest information, like a product catalog. Best is that you can generate the presentation over and over for your reporting. A real timesaver for most of our clients.
See some articles:
https://www.presentationpoint.com/blog/mail-merge-powerpoint-presentations/
https://www.presentationpoint.com/blog/kpi-reporting-using-powerpoint/
https://www.presentationpoint.com/blog/bi-reporting-tools-powerpoint/
https://www.presentationpoint.com/blog/25-percent-increase-of-productivity/
Let me know if you have questions. Free trial is available. Hope it helps.
If you have the data in Excel, then it makes the most sense to create reports to analyze and visualize the data in Excel as well.
The typical process is to insert pivot table from raw data and create reports from the pivot table data.
Our tool Zebra BI is designed with exactly that purpose in mind. It’s an Excel add-in that adds advanced charts (Variance charts, Waterfalls, Hills&Valleys, Lollipops, …) to Excel and also offers a number of other advanced features: scaling multiple charts, inserting difference highlights, creating small multiples with 2 clicks, exporting to multiple formats, publishing to SharePoint.
You can see example reports in our gallery: https://zebrabi.com/gallery/
I suggest you give Zebra BI a try, it’s free for 30 days with no obligations: https://zebrabi.com/free-trial/
If you need any help designing your reports, let me know. I already have a couple of ideas after looking at your sample data. 🙂