Haavest | Reporting for a Logistics Service Provider

Task

Before contacting Haavest, our client asked a strategy consultancy to develop a concept for the centralization of a major part of the reporting. Huge amounts of data, resulting from numerous different sources such as ERP systems, scanner data etc., were available. So a procedure was planned in order to integrate hundreds of key figures with all their diverse attributes into a joint database.

Our task then consisted in depicting the technically different indicators in a way that made it possible to interpret – despite all complex diverse interrelations – the most important insights directly and always at a glance.

Therefore we asked ourselves: how can we succeed in satisfying both top executives, who are mainly interested in the big picture, as well as employees who are responsible for the details? And not to forget: how can we implement the complex logics and interdependencies caused by the large number of indicators technically, in an appropriate manner so that the future need for adjustments will still be as little as possible? Our answer to that was the following:

Implementation

First we started with a requirements workshop for the company’s executives. This resulted in reporting standards that would be able to quickly establish themselves. The main benefit of these standards is the fact that dashboard users from different divisions can build up an equal understanding of the given information. Reporting standards make different dashboards easily accessible, because the users can recognize consistently designed charts across various reportings. In parallel, a data model was designed, which could be optimally used for the visualizations, performance and self-service analyses.

So a lot of finesse in terms of data model design was needed in order to provide an appropriately tidy framework for the technical complexity. But probably the most complex individual task in this project was to develop a data security concept which is able to calculate, depending on which user is logged in, how large his or her subordinate units are and shows or hides data on that basis.

But the mere development, consulting and documentation of the concept wasn’t enough. Never forget the team! That is why we subsequently trained the department to enable everyone to create their own good reports in accordance with the self-service approach. Afterwards all employees were able to answer their own specific questions on the topic and, thanks to their compliance with reporting standards, to share the created reportings effortlessly with each other, without having to explain much to the viewer.