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.

KFS focuses on world-class, customized service for large fleet operations. Clients from around the world work directly with the KFS Executive Team, who oversees a streamlined and efficient operation.

Kelley Fleet Services started in 1999 and has experienced a meteoric growth in the last years. In order to meet the company’s requirements regarding maximization of profits and competitiveness, and providing accountability to Management and investors KFS needed to consolidate data from the multiple systems, provide data in an actionable and flexible format (Excel based graphical dashboard and other relevant reports) reducing delays in the provision of P&L and other key data.

DataCycle Reporting’s easy of use, quick implementation and fast results have convinced Kelley Fleet Services Management Team, who also sees benefits like reducing redundancies, delays, errors and omissions associated with periodic standard report creation and distribution as well as manual processes , improving support for Executive planning and decision making.

KFS has immediate plans to automate management Dashboards and improve dynamic reporting, to allow other key users within the company take advantage of DataCycles analytical capabilities.

About Kelley Fleet Services, LLC

Privately held and headquartered in Mission Viejo, California, Kelley Fleet Services was created in 1999 to provide fleet management to growing organizations worldwide. KFS's primary goal is to understand their client's business objectives and the challenges they face relative to their current fleet management process and provide innovative solutions to meet those objectives.

Kelley Fleet Services is an extended family of more than 200 employees; a world-class company with homegrown roots. Through tremendous executive leadership, KFS has built a solid reputation for service, customer by customer, from the ground up.

Grifols, a Spanish holding specialised in the pharmaceutical-hospital sector and present in more than 90 countries, has gone for DataCycle Reporting and DataCycle MyVision solutions to integrate them with their Hospital Logistics solutions.

The project requirements consisted of having a standard adapted and parameterized market solution to become a part of the solution supplied by Grifols to its end clients, in other words, it had to be an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) solution that could be integrated as its own product in the Grifols offer.

After studying several alternatives, Grifols decided to purchase the global solution proposed by Apesoft, which included the products from the DataCycle Suite; DataCycle Reporting, as a generator, planner and distributor of reports in HTML, Pdf and Excel format, and DataCycle MyVision, that allows the access via web to reports, that are both pre-generated and executable on demand. It also included an optimization project of the databases and parameterization of the final reports needed.

The technological solution offered by Apesoft was the one that best fitted Grifols needs and requirements, above all for its simplicity of usage, quick start up, low training costs, minimum technological impact for the end user and capacity for generating reports in multiple formats such as Html, Pdf and Excel, amongst other features and advantages. It must also be pointed out that the new solution had to fulfil a basic requirement for Grifols: It needed an agile software mechanism to provide a quick response to all of its clients. In this sense, the project proposed by Apesoft did not include any custom designs, and was completely based on the standard DataCycle suite products, which enabled significant maintenance cost savings. Furthermore, Apesoft’s development and support center is based in Spain, very near to the client, and could therefore respond really quickly to any requirement or request from Grifols.

The start up was planned starting a pilot test in two strategic hospitals given their volume and complexity, one in Barcelona and the other in Madrid. When this first phase of the project was successfully finished, the deployment of the solution started in other hospitals who already have Hospital Logistics solutions, which underlines the excellent integration of the Apesoft solution with the aforementioned Grifols’ solutions.

Grifols distributes all this technology under its own trademark, Global Analyst® Pro, to make it more accessible to the hospital sector and to give it the added value needed to associate it correctly to the Hospital Logistics solutions supplied by the multinational.

Aguas Font Vella y Lanjarón SA , a company belonging to the Danone Group, no. 2 in the world in bottled water, is improving the analysis of the information from its sales force with the DataCycle Reporting solution.

Faced with the change in its Commercial Information System, Font Vella needed to incorporate a new solution to resolve the Reporting needs of the company’s Commercial area. It looked to cover the need with a tool similar to the one they already had, but which provided new functions, helping them to become more autonomous when making any changes, and above all, enabling off-line information analysis.

The autonomy in the administration, design and automation of the generation and distribution of the reports in Excel, the capacity for being able to analyse the information without the need for being connected to any system, together with a very reasonable general solution cost, were the deciding factors when opting for DataCycle Reporting.

Thanks to ApeSoft’s DataCycle Reporting solution, Aguas Font Vella y Lanjarón SA’s sales force, made up of around 100 sales reps in 5 delegations, receives sales reports with different levels of detail, that provide them with sales analyses by client, product and category, and other analytical dimensions. In this way the solution helps to optimize their activity and decision making.

If you would like to receive information on this solution, send us an email to marketing@apesoft.com

EMERGIA Customer Care will improve its reporting and budgeting processes with DataCycle Reporting and DataCycle Planning.

Emergia Customer Care, a Spanish multinational, pioneer in Customer Care Strategic Consultancy and Integral BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Services for the Spanish speaking worldwide market, has committed itself to the DataCycle Reporting and DataCycle Planning solutions to improve the company’s reporting and budgeting processes.

The introduction of the two solutions has been divided into two phases. In a first phase the reporting project will be tackled, which will consist of the construction of a data warehouse to import and collect the information from the company’s databases and in the design of reports that consult this data. In the second phase the DataCycle Planning solution start-up project will be carried out, the objective of which is to automate the budget preparation and tracking process in Emergia.

With the introduction of these two new solutions, Emergia Customer Care will be able to optimize the company’s reporting, thanks to the automated generation of all types of reports, and strengthen its budgetary process, thanks to the centralization of the budgetary information, via web and Excel as an end user interface, safely in a specific database, allowing for having absolute control on all the process and carrying out periodic checks on it.

About Emergia Customer Care

Emergia with headquarters in Barcelona and Madrid, and multiple Virtual Contact Centers located in Europe and Latin America (Colombia, Chile, Ecuador), has become consolidated as the multinational of reference in delocalization competing with the leading consultancy companies. It promotes a fast response to market and client needs on incorporating new relationship models for its globalised Outsourcing and Customer Service services, and contributing, thanks to the improvement in service levels, to demonstrating its commitment to innovation and differentiation in processes and procedures for its clients, large corporations and entities in multiple sectors. Corporación Financiera Valora has a shareholding in this company.