How to Better your Reporting

This is not the first time we've shared an article on reporting.  So why do we keep doing it?  Because quality reporting may be most important things a Facilities Department can do!  The facilities management industry is rapidly prioritizes data collection, management, and storage we must provide better reporting.

High quality, efficient reporting is vital for your company to grow and IWMS plays an integral role in reporting success.  IWMS helps promote data accuracy, increase productivity, reduces cost, and effortlessly sharing information throughout your company.  This means you can more accurately and precisely see what changes need to be made and more strategically plan for the future -- making a direct impact on your bottom line.

So here are a few tips we have for better reporting:

Reporting Goals

DETERMINE WHAT TO TRACK

The first step in successful reporting, is to determine what to track.  Make a list of resources to manage and relationships between those resources.  For example:

• What resources are you managing?
• Costs
• People
• Space
• Time
• What does your boss need to know?
• Cost per Area
• Headcount changes over Time
• Occupancy vs. Capacity
• What is the story you are trying to tell?
• What point are you trying to make?

Once you have this information, you can create an idealized report.  An effective idealized report will direct strategic decisions that affect the bottom line.

Considerations

There is no standard list of what to track.  The information that matters most will vary from one company to another.

• Tracking furniture won't make sense for a publicly traded corporation who considers the furniture depreciated the moment it is purchased.
  OR
• Tracking furniture does make sense for a company that is owned by a single private owner because of how taxes are assessed.
• Perhaps tracking employee locations through audits is useful as it will indicate how much capacity is available and how much is needed.
  OR
• Your company track moves.  Tracking moves allows you to track churn rate (the percentage of people who have moved over the course of the year) which indicates expansion and contractions.

IWMS & Excel

Excel is a great tool for developing an idealized report.  It is easy to work with.  It is fluid.  You can mock something up that gets the point across quickly.  Often it is used as the main reporting tool before moving to IWMS.

So, once this data is availalbe we often get the question: "Can I export this to Excel?"

This question has significantly more depth than may appear on the surface.  It indicates:

1. A need for a report that is generated frequently
2. That the information provided from ARCHIBUS needs to be filtered or enhanced in some way.
3. That the person asking the question has a strong grasp of the abilities of Excel, but may not understand the capacity of ARCHIBUS as a reporting tool.

Monthly reports should come directly from IWMS (like ARCHIBUS).  Using IWMS for reporting will keep all reports up to date and reduce processing time.  Consider the total cost of a report:

• How long does it take your team to produce this report? 
• X #of hours
• How often does your team produce this report? 
• Y frequency
• How much is your team paid per hour? 
• Z cost/hour
• X*Y*Z = cost of the report

Don't let your team spend too much time and energy creating reports manually in excel.  An IWMS application, like ARCHIBUS, will generate the reports in a fraction of the time.  You will see the ROI in the long run by creating an ARCHIBUS report up-front.  


Most reporting needs to be fulfilled by ARCHIBUS's standard reports that take very little time to launch.  But even if you or your team want a specific excel report automated in ARCHIBUS, we can easily create it for you. If we can create the report for less than the total cost of developing the report by hand, over time we will save you money.

In following these simple guidelines, you can have greater success in your reporting.  By planning out your idealized report, you can ensure you and your team are tracking the right information for your company and communicating correct statistics to help reduce overall cost

.

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