Nowadays, all managers are thinking about how to mitigate the impact of the economic downturn in their organizations. Among the different tools that may be considered for this purpose, there is one that is key: information. In this article we talk about information for making decisions, which is generated from the data that each organization is holding in their systems, and particularly we talk about one of the key reports management definitely need in current climate: the daily report.

In times of crisis, information must be deployed quickly, must run up and down and back up with a larger distribution and a higher frequency to really reach everybody.

DAILY REPORTING

Daily reports delivered to a large part of the company, are a very effective way of tackling the crisis. Daily reports are generated and distributed every day early in the morning and reach almost everyone within the organization. The characteristics of daily reports are:

1. They inform. They show relevant information on a daily basis, informing about daily performance, and directly relating our daily activity with company results.

2. They create conscience. They inform about real enterprise facts, creating conscience about what is happening, and they usually unify data from different areas of the organization: sales, delivery, production, new customers, accounting, etc. It must be the same daily report, independently of position and area, showing the same “pulse of the company” for everybody. Optionally, additional, area based and more specific daily reports can also exist.

3. They imply: Because they run daily, they communicate a follow up that is very close to actual activity, making everybody, and every area feeling implied in acting on the day-by-day performance, to assure achieving monthly and annual objectives.

4. Allow for faster decision making: Because of their high frequency, daily reports allows for analyzing deviations and defining tactics to fix or mitigate them, even faster.

Which information should they contain?

Information coming from several areas which have data that changes on a daily basis. They should have objectives for each data to show if we are performing well or not, and how big deviations are.

How should they look like?

They should be very visual – like a Dashboard (report with light warnings, graphs, gauges and other visual elements), that allow for going into detail in order to make decisions. They should be in a familiar format, so everybody can work with it without having to go through training, for example a very graphical Excel Spreadsheet.

How should they ideally get to the user?

Via electronic mail every day at 7:00 A.M.

ALERTS

Imagine getting an email when something happens in the company that is especially important to you, and this, just when it happens. This concept is called alerting and usually it looks like an email or sms with a subject telling what is happening, a body with the next steps and a brief description of the alert, and optionally an attached report giving more details about the issue.

For example:

1. Sales in the North Region have dropped more than X% compared with forecast or previous year

2. Customer X has not bought product A for more than Y months

3. Customer X should have paid invoice M with due date MM/DD/YYYY

4. Productivity has dropped under X units/day

5. There are pending orders that could not be shipped to your customer X due to delays in production.

Alerts offer you following advantages:

1. They allow for reacting faster to threats and opportunities.

2. They allow for monitoring and control key performance indicators being informed immediately in case of deviations.

3. They save time since there is no need for you to manually check if these critical situations are taking place.

4. They alert you in a reactive way, no matter where you are, and with no need for requesting information or monitoring a report.

Which information should they include and how do they have to look like?

Alerts need to be sent via email with a personalized subject depending on the recipient, describing the alert and adding any data that can describe how critical it is. For example “The customer SAMPLIA Inc. has not ordered product A for 3 months”

The email body should include more details and probably an attachment (an Excel Spreadsheet for instance) with detailed sales information about the last year – in the case of the Samplia Inc. in our example.

How should they ideally get to the user?

Via electronic mail or SMS when the alert takes place

ApeSoft is especially motivated to provide high value solutions that help in these times of Economic Slow Down. Therefore we have now special conditions and discounts to facilitate acquiring our software solutions, in order to provide you with these power full tools as daily reporting and alerting, which will help you dealing with the economic crisis and coming out victorious.