InetSoft Webinar: Proof of Concept of the New KPIs on the iPad

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in February 2014on the topic of "Applying Analytics to Improve Performance in Law Firms" The moderator is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

We were able to show them or preview the proof of concept of the new KPIs on the iPad. We could flip through the different things, which we will show you in a minute, and drill down into some of the detail. On the iPad, there is a little icon, you can click on that and it creates a drawer on it and it sends off the email.

So I did that. I sent that to the chairman just highlighting one particular group’s performance and putting a big tick on it, and it just stunned the whole audience, to be honest, that they didn’t expect anything like that. And so in terms of wow factors and that kind of thing, it was amazing for us to be able to put it on a new platform.

And we will talk about it in a bit more detail later on, but one of the successes in addition to the structure and the KPIs and business analytics to go with it, is just having it on a new platform has got some novelty value for our partners. For them to be able to receive and use it straight off was a big deal. It’s been exciting to watch actually. So that got us to June.

We then did a first mockup of the dashboard, the only reason we couldn’t report all the KPIs when we got to the 30th of June was because we had new instructions. We hadn’t kept profit/losses in the new department structure, but we had all the data.

So then we went on to build for our September quarter, we went on to build the first live version which we did with no real problem at all. I have only got three guys who do all the BI asset building for me. The InetSoft BI tools were fairly new to them. We got a consultant in for about a week to get them up to speed on that, and that’s the only outside help we had. And yeah, we went live with the thing for the September quarter and have gone from there.

Mark: So Ron, can you give us an overview of your BI solution and how it’s been implemented?

Ron: Sure. At the heart of our system is a financial reporting system. We take feeds from account relationship software, from project management software, from budgets, from payroll, from our practice management which is general ledger and a lot of statistics about employee performance. That all goes into the cubes.

Out of that, we produce financial reports, and they come out, in some cases, daily. We call it production if it comes out daily. We have weekly time management type reporting and then monthly profit/loss and quarterly performance reports and profit/loss types of reports. Statutory tax type of reporting also comes out of it.

We contribute data to different industry surveys in order to benchmark ourselves against other law firms. All our budgeting and forecasting is in this financial system. Dashboarding we will come to in a minute. For partner performance management, we keep a lot of statistics about the partners and how they perform on their billings and on the measures, and we report that.

It’s just coming up now that we have an annual review of the equity levels of the partners in June each year, and that’s just coming up obviously, so we are fairly busy preparing those reports. We keep a lot of statistics on our lawyers about how busy they are, how profitable they are, how many we have got, all that sort of thing.

And also we do a reasonable amount of ad hoc reporting. So the board at different times has different requests of can you tell us about this, that or the other, and we pick that data right out of the warehouse using InetSoft. So InetSoft is really the heart of our financial reporting.

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Our reporting audiences can range from a single lawyer just getting statistics about their own performance up to what I call like a standard lawyer who gets details about their own performance but also of their team. And then we have got management and board reporting, where senior management is the audience.

And in the middle of that, we have got a group of analysts, either in marketing particularly or in our commercial side, on the finance team who understand a lot of their KPIs, look at trends, where things are headed, what is causing different things to happen, and they feed that back to the partners and let them know whatever might be happening.