What is an Ad Hoc Report?

An ad hoc report is a report that is created on demand for unanticipated business questions. In contrast to a production report that is pre-designed for known business questions, ad hoc report requirements exhibit noticeably different characteristics:

	Ad Hoc Report	Production Report
Report Creators	Self-service business users	IT oriented developers/analysts
Data Preparedness	No ready support	Well prepared. May even be supported by a data warehouse
Output Requirement	From paginated to visual analytic reports	Paginated reports

Ad Hoc Report Uses

Ad hoc reports are often also used to meet analytic requirements. In these scenarios, the business question is not only unanticipated but also not well defined. For example, a sales manager may try to find the root cause of the sudden popularity of a particular product. For analysis oriented ad hoc reports, the key requirements are the ability to:

Quickly switch perspectives and parameters for exploration
Intuitively detect patterns or trends in the graphic or visualization
Easily navigate and mashup multiple data sources when required
Scale to big data if mashup and/or analytic scope requires it

Ad hoc reports are usually created for a single use. However, valuable ad hoc reports often turn into useful long-term assets. The sales manager may want to schedule the report or to repeat the analysis on an on-going basis. It also may become worthy of sharing with other users.

SAFE(simple, adaptable, flexible and endurable) are four defining properties of a robust ad hoc reporting solution:

Simple to learn: power users and casual users can all maximize their self-service
Adaptable to use: user can adapt it from a traditional ad hoc report to a tool for visual analytics
Flexibility on data: transform, mashup and scale with ad hoc assembled data
Endurable for long term: ad hoc outputs are ready to be used for long term purposes

RenalTech Services Moves from NetSuite to StyleBI for Ad Hoc Reporting

RenalTech Services maintains thousands of hemodialysis machines, peritoneal dialysis cyclers, CRRT systems, and water treatment equipment across North American dialysis centers and hospitals. Every day, their technicians complete hundreds of preventive maintenance visits, emergency repairs, and compliance calibrations. Behind this field operation sits a constant need for fast, accurate, custom reports: which device models are failing most often in specific regions? How quickly are technicians resolving high-priority calls? Which parts inventory is trending toward shortage before the next quarter?

Until mid-2025, the company answered these questions primarily through Oracle NetSuite. NetSuite handled core ERP duties—financials, service order management, inventory tracking, purchasing, and customer contracts—reasonably well. Its saved searches and basic reporting features covered standardized monthly and quarterly outputs. However, anything outside those predefined paths became painful.

Where NetSuite Reporting Started Breaking Down

The first serious friction appeared when service managers wanted to analyze patterns that crossed module boundaries. A typical ad hoc request looked like this: “Show me all CRRT machines serviced more than three times in the last six months, grouped by hospital, including total parts cost, average resolution time, and the primary technician involved—only for units located in the Midwest.” NetSuite users could eventually build such a report using multiple joined saved searches, but the process frequently required:

Twenty to forty minutes of trial-and-error criteria building
Help from someone who understood SuiteScript or advanced search syntax
Export to Excel followed by manual pivoting and VLOOKUP cleanup

Performance degraded noticeably once the database contained more than four years of detailed service history. A report that took eight seconds in 2022 could take ninety seconds or more by early 2025. During peak months, when regional managers needed answers before daily stand-up calls, waiting became unacceptable.

Regulatory reporting added further pressure. Annual FDA and CMS audits require detailed proof of preventive maintenance schedules, calibration records, and corrective actions tied to specific device serial numbers. Auditors increasingly expect trend analysis (e.g., “Has the failure rate of model X increased since the supplier changed the pump membrane material in Q3 2023?”). NetSuite’s native tools offered limited support for time-series comparisons and almost no built-in visualization beyond basic charts.

Finally, the hidden cost accumulated. RenalTech spent roughly $180,000 annually on NetSuite consultants who built, optimized, and maintained custom reports and dashboards. That figure excluded the opportunity cost of internal analysts spending half their time acting as report translators for operations and sales teams.

“Flexible product with great training and support. The product has been very useful for quickly creating dashboards and data views. Support and training has always been available to us and quick to respond.

- George R, Information Technology Specialist at Sonepar USA

Why StyleBI Became the Target Solution

After reviewing several business intelligence platforms during Q1 2025, the evaluation team selected StyleBI. Three characteristics drove the decision:

Self-service ad hoc speed — Users build complex reports by dragging fields onto a canvas. No scripting required. Natural language query handles most English-language questions (“Which dialysis centers have had more than two unscheduled downtime events this year?”).
Native, real-time NetSuite connector — StyleBI pulls data directly through NetSuite’s REST API without nightly ETL jobs or duplicate data stores. Service orders, inventory transactions, and financial postings stay current.
Service-industry focus — Pre-built calculation libraries for MTBF, MTTR, first-time fix rate, technician utilization, and warranty recovery analysis fit RenalTech’s daily vocabulary immediately.

The licensing model also helped. StyleBI charged per named user rather than per report creator + viewer combination, making broad rollout across operations, field management, and finance economically viable.

Implementation Timeline

The project kicked off in April 2025 and reached production usage by October 2025.

Month 1–2: Data inventory and mapping. The team identified 47 critical NetSuite record types (service orders, inventory adjustments, technician time entries, customer sites, device assets) and approximately 280 fields that needed to be available in StyleBI. Security rules mirrored NetSuite role permissions.

Month 3: Pilot with twelve users (four regional operations managers, three inventory planners, two finance analysts, three IT staff). StyleBI consultants delivered two weeks of hands-on workshops. Pilot users built twenty high-value reports, including a live “Parts Consumption Forecast by Device Type” dashboard that became an instant favorite.

Month 4–5: Full data model refinement, mobile report optimization, and HIPAA-aligned row-level security. Historical service notes (free-text) were processed with StyleBI’s built-in text extraction to create categorical tags such as “membrane rupture,” “flow error,” or “alarm fatigue.”

Month 6: Staged rollout. Finance went live first (cost and margin reports), followed by operations (service performance), then field supervisors (mobile access to device history at the point of service). Training reached 340 users through recorded sessions, quick-reference guides, and weekly office hours.

View the gallery of examples of dashboards and visualizations.

Results After Three Months in Production

By January 2026, measurable improvements are visible across several dimensions:

Average time to create a new ad hoc report dropped from 45 minutes to under 4 minutes.
IT/reporting support tickets related to custom analytics decreased by 82%.
Parts stock-out incidents fell 28% after inventory planners started using weekly trend reports with automatic low-stock alerts.
Mean time to resolve high-priority service calls improved by 17%, partly because dispatchers can now see real-time technician skill matrix and travel time estimates within the same interface.
Annual external consulting spend on reporting dropped by approximately $145,000 (projected full-year savings).

Qualitative changes are equally significant. Regional managers now start most Monday meetings by pulling the latest StyleBI dashboard rather than waiting for Friday’s static PDF. Field technicians increasingly reference device service history on tablets while on-site, reducing repeat visits for the same unresolved issue. Sales representatives use customer-specific trend reports during renewal discussions, showing concrete uptime improvements after RenalTech took over servicing contracts.

Looking Forward

RenalTech plans to activate StyleBI’s machine learning anomaly detection module in Q2 2026. The goal is to flag unusual failure clusters earlier (e.g., a sudden spike in pressure valve faults across multiple clinics in the same water district). Longer term, the company is exploring integration with IoT telemetry feeds from newer dialysis machines, allowing predictive service recommendations before devices even log a fault code.

The move from NetSuite’s built-in reporting to StyleBI has not eliminated the ERP system; it has liberated it to focus on what it does best while giving every department fast, flexible answers to questions that change daily in the nephrology service world.

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