An Enterprise Reporting System Gives Multiple Options
This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "An Explanation of Business Intelligence." The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, Product Manager at InetSoft.
An enterprise reporting system is going to give us multiple options. If you remember our little pyramid, let me draw a straight line. So we've got our pyramid. Down here are the executives, and up here we've got the team leads. So if we are a team lead, our reporting is probably directly into these systems here. We are wanting to see the individual defects. We are wanting to take a look at a particular order.
We are wanting to look at one or two or three individual entries by our team members. Down here with the executives though, the executive reporting is wanting to go against the data warehouse. The executives want less detail, more aggregations. We want to see how this is working within the enterprise. So that's likely against the data warehouse.
Now this is not all. There's one more aspect of a business intelligence implementation. Can you guess? Can you imagine what it might be? I'll tell you it's not technically software. It's not technically hardware based. We have the databases people put stuff into. We have the reports that people read and theoretically used for smart decision making. What's missing here? What's missing is training.
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Give People Great Reporting Systems
You can give people great reporting systems. You can give them great reports, but if they are not trained on how to use them, if they don't understand the meaning of these reports, if they don't stop bugging your programmers to create new reports because those reports already exist out there, but this person just refuses to listen and understand that they are already there, then it's just going to be a failure for that person. So training on how to use the reporting system is going to be very important.
I did segment this originally in my first version of this slide, and there were multiple areas of training, but in the end I just left it to be training on how to use the reporting system because I felt the other segments were covered already. The other thing that I was going to include just to kind of give you an idea, is that your users or your programmers, somebody needs to be trained on data quality. Garbage in equals garbage out, right.
So as the data comes into the data entry systems, we need to A, make sure that it's consistent as it comes into the data warehouse. We need to B, make sure that it conforms to a unified set of agreed upon rules and principles. We were all going to be reporting from the data warehouse so we have to interdepartmentally work together to come up with what the accepted things that go into the data warehouse are.
I know that's an understatement. We will cover more of that when we talk about what the data warehouse is. But this is your pretty standard very generic version of what business intelligence is all about. It's not a system. It's not a methodology. It’s not just about decision support. It's about the training. It's about the hardware and the software. It's a whole system that has to be implemented by the organization.
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About Monitoring Change
Now another thing about BI that I want to bring to mind is I think that it's all about monitoring change. It's identifying the things that are trending upwards or trending downwards and understanding why, understanding the context. For example, we are a supermarket, and all of a sudden we had this huge spike in sales in potato chips one day. If we were looking at it out of context, we might think that we just need to make sure on Fridays we have a large stock of potato chips.
But what if it just so happens that there was some major community food drive that gave people a tax credit for buying potato chips and donating them, and so therefore it was a one-time thing. We don't want to have a lot of potato chips in the store anymore. Let’s wait until next year if they do it again we’ll order extra potato chips, okay.
A regional food bank serving multiple counties adopted InetSoft’s StyleBI platform to modernize its enterprise reporting, replacing a patchwork of spreadsheets and legacy reporting tools. The organization needed a single, unified source of truth for tracking food inventory, donor contributions, volunteer hours, and distribution efficiency across dozens of partner agencies. StyleBI’s serverless architecture made it possible to connect directly to the food bank’s ERP, CRM, and warehouse management systems, blending the data into interactive dashboards without costly infrastructure upgrades. This transformation not only saved IT time but also provided executives, operations managers, and program coordinators with real-time insights into where food was needed most.
With StyleBI’s flexible data mashup capabilities, the food bank could easily merge structured donation records with unstructured feedback from community partners, creating a richer view of program performance. Prebuilt and custom KPIs tracked metrics such as cost per meal delivered, percentage of perishable food distributed within freshness windows, and regional variance in supply levels. Interactive drill-down features enabled users to move from a high-level view—such as total monthly meals distributed—to individual delivery routes, uncovering bottlenecks or opportunities for redistribution. These insights allowed the food bank to reduce waste, optimize inventory turnover, and ensure perishable goods reached high-demand areas faster.
The reporting improvements also had a major impact on donor relations and compliance. StyleBI made it possible to automatically generate visually engaging reports that broke down how contributions translated into community impact, segmented by donor type, campaign, and region. This level of transparency improved donor retention and helped secure additional funding from grant-making organizations that demanded rigorous reporting. From a compliance perspective, automated audit trails and data validation rules reduced manual errors and ensured adherence to food safety and tracking regulations. By leveraging StyleBI, the food bank elevated its analytics maturity, aligning day-to-day operations with its mission of feeding more people more efficiently.
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