Enterprise reporting is the pillar of business intelligence and analytics — where would we be without reports? Though Excel supports insights on the fly, modern enterprises want more robust and faster ad hoc reporting tools. In this article, we discuss their applications, benefits and features, with the challenges in implementing them.

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Key Takeaways

• Ad Hoc reporting supports faster line-of-business operations with instant insight.
• Self-service capabilities are a given in instant reporting platforms.
• Managed reports have a fixed direction of analysis, while on-the-fly reporting helps you think radially and ask probing questions.
• Favoring ad hoc insight over canned reports isn’t the best approach.
• A robust data management and integration strategy with proper governance is a must to optimize your software investment.

So, what is an Ad Hoc report, and do you need one?

In this article, we will cover the below topics:

• What Is Ad Hoc Reporting?
• What Is Ad Hoc Analysis?
• Applications
• Benefits
• Canned vs. Ad Hoc Reports
• Challenges
• Must-have Features
• Wrapping Up

What is Ad Hoc Reporting?

Ad hoc reporting is a business intelligence method to answer critical questions by creating on-the-fly reports. The term ad hoc is Latin for “for this situation.” The idea is to make faster line-of-business decisions with easy access to information, including performance and sales metrics.

With market competition being cutthroat, companies know that it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. They’re all for giving greater information access and control to streamline department-level tasks. Every small decision contributes to the top-level strategy.

Autonomy is the hallmark of instant insight — when you want information on the spot, there’s no time to ask for help. It’s the reason why ad hoc reporting tools are user-friendly.

Teams create numerous ad hoc reports daily — the process is inherent in daily tasks. Vendors offer many feature-rich enterprise reporting platforms, which can make the task of software selection a challenging one.

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What Is Ad Hoc Analysis?

Ad hoc analysis is a business intelligence methodology for instant insight in response to pressing queries about specific metrics or situations. It’s required chiefly during meetings, presentations and daily tasks.

Ad hoc analysis answers questions that existing reports and dashboards can’t answer — it’s instant and self-service. It can involve mentally connecting the dots to deduce correlations and dependencies. It’s usually in report form at the enterprise level, with underlying housed in company warehouses.

An ad hoc report might not stay the same as you explore data — uncovering new insight might lead to new views and visualizations. Managed reports have a formatted, static design but lag in answering probing questions about specific metrics.

Ad hoc analysis fills this gap — you can find answers by linking to other reports and combining information from them. These reports are precise and mostly single-use.

Applications

Ad Hoc reporting software supports every department and industry. Examples include human resources, workforce, inventory and enterprise performance management. Like managed reports, you can save instant visualizations and share them via regular routes as email attachments and shareable links for authorized users.

• Operations Tracking: An on-the-spot report on employee attendance, day-to-day responsibilities, orders placed, and inventory stock gives you instant visibility into organizational processes and progress. Identifying performance bottlenecks and why they happen gives you the necessary information to act promptly.
• Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Research: Instant views of patient histories speed up consultations, helping physicians attend to more people daily.

  The German pharmaceutical giant, Boehringer Ingelheim, uses the IBM database for pharma research by collecting information about medical diagnosis and treatment paths. That’s the back end — the front end is simpler.

  With a few simple clicks, researchers can create ad hoc views of deidentified patient information from IBM’s MarketScan Research database. There are countless such examples of healthcare-associated organizations benefiting from instant data views.
• Retail, Marketing and eCommerce: Instant reports flag loss-making aspects like shoplifting incidents and employee theft by tracking inventories. Customer retention, inventory management and service personalization are other downstream benefits of instant reporting.
• Software Development: Product development is a dynamic discipline, with frequent team meetups like stand-ups, sprint planning sessions, review meetings and sprint retrospectives. Instant views of task status, issues raised, tests completed and features delivered keep everyone in the loop.
• Field Insight: Field workers upload equipment and status reports to company databases that feed downstream processes and decisions. If a machine breaks down, instant reports give you all the necessary facts to perform a root cause analysis.

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Primary Benefits

Anytime insight can make all the difference, helping you stay ahead of the curve.

Reduce Time to Insight

Less time to scale, information overload and other responsibilities can make it tough to navigate your way through exhaustive information served up in managed reports. With instant insight, you can avoid the learning curve involved.

On-the-fly reports are the smaller, compact version of routine reports — they highlight the pertinent information, saving time. By viewing instant metrics, you can directly access business intelligence and act outside of a canned report schedule.

Many such reports exist for just the time it takes to glean the necessary information, and then you move on to the next.

Acquire Information Anytime

Automated reporting tools deliver information according to schedule or when a trigger condition is achieved. But ad hoc is the way to go when waiting for a report to drop into your inbox at the end of the day isn’t an option. An instant report is a few clicks away, pushing the results to you when you most need them.

The capability to view metrics on the fly gives you an edge, keeping you productive without having to switch applications. It’s why embedded platforms are in demand. Custom reporting tools give you greater control over how you view and present the metrics.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

Get a peek into the future — regression modeling helps validate or disprove business strategies when talking to stakeholders. Instant insight into sales and performance trends drives the direction of your business.

Staying ahead of the competition doesn’t involve going all out by innovating when it’s not the right time. Forecasting gives you insight into when to diversify without hurting your bottom line. Upward sales projections for the next two to five years in a line graph can get your stakeholders thinking seriously about investing in growth-targeted strategies.

A managed report can tell you all this and more. What if your stakeholders want to view the projections by country, the top 15 high-performing cities, or the most critical five KPIs? It’s when an instant view comes in handy.

Track Metrics Live

Instant views are possible with Excel, but keeping them updated is a struggle. By the time you finish importing the data and pivoting on it to get the necessary view, time has moved on, and the information is outdated.

No one wants yesterday’s news, especially when it’s market trends and business intelligence. Live source connectivity is the strength of instant views, and self-service exploration and report-building ensure real-time views in the true sense.

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Canned vs. Ad Hoc Reports

• Instant reports are single-use data snapshots in time shared with limited audiences. They are easy to create, and anyone with basic computer skills and sound domain knowledge can build them.

  Managed reports have proper formatting, well-defined parameters and a custom look, requiring technical skills to design. They have larger audiences and are planned ahead of time, often for periodic reporting.

• On-the-fly reports answer specific, spontaneous questions and are more visual. Canned reports, also called static reports, show metrics related to a particular department or category and answer specific recurring questions. End-of-month reports are good examples of canned reports.
• Instant reports are dynamic and open to change. Static reports contain comprehensive metrics, can be large and don’t invite much change. They are organized, clean and polished and answer crucial business queries.

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Challenges

Half-baked data management policies can cause many problems when deriving instant insight.

• Siloed Information: Instant analysis doesn’t leave time to check if your system is connected to the proper data sources, resulting in erroneous conclusions. Siloed, unused data is money down the drain.
• Lack of Governance: Insecure information is prone to corruption and loss due to tampering, accidental and otherwise. Non-reliable information is of no use to anyone.
• Missing Data Standardization: Inconsistent metrics will lead to erroneous reports and flawed insight, and downstream processes will suffer.
• Improper Training: Lack of domain knowledge and data exploration skills can hinder instant insight. Thinking linearly in terms of static reports can be counterproductive. Ad hoc insight demands a critical-thinking mindset.
• Relying Only on Instant Analysis: Instant insight can be habit-forming, leading users to depend heavily on it at the risk of ignoring traditional reports. Your teams risk missing out on the valuable information available in managed insight.

  Companies must have a delicate balance between the two reporting modes to get maximum value from their platforms.

A robust information management strategy, proper training and adherence to a data culture can help avoid these pitfalls.

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Must-have Features

Customization and interactivity top enterprises’ wish lists for data tools. Fast time to market leaves no time for employee hand-holding, which is why independent analysis is in demand. A self-service reporting tool should have these basic features:

• User-friendly Interface: A what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface encourages rapid adoption. Drag-and-drop actions and information views on hovering over data points help keep your users scaling quicker.
• Customizable Visualizations: A rich visualization library is a must to view the desired insight. An ad hoc report that embeds visualizations and other sub-reports add value to the presented information. Having live data refreshes is a bonus.
• Simple Data Manipulation: Sorting, filtering and grouping to view the desired information should be straightforward and doable for at least 80% of users.
• Shareability: Insight sharing is the purpose of business intelligence. Ad hoc reporting software lets you share reports in standard formats. In-report collaboration promotes meaningful discussions.

Get our readymade requirements template to define your business needs before starting your software search. Check out our comparison report for an in-depth analysis of the best reporting tools.

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Wrapping Up

A cautionary note: mission creep can set in without guardrails — it’s ideal to stick to answering what is asked. You don’t want to cause decision fatigue by cluttering the report with too many metrics. Additionally, sources will become more inclusive with time — choose a self-service reporting tool that can pull information from multiple, diverse sources.

How have you effectively utilized ad hoc reporting in your business? Let us know in the comments below.