Ad hoc reporting is the creation of reports on the fly, that is, reports that are meant to answer one specific business question. This is a special category of reporting that is meant to be built and distributed by non-technical users. An ad hoc reporting tool is used to answer specific business questions that a regular enterprise report does not have the information for. It bridges the gaps that a traditional report creates and helps bring deeper insights to the decision-makers.
Ad hoc vs Canned Reports
A traditional BI report is a preformatted report that is created for one specific purpose by data specialists, and it answers only limited questions. But the problem arises when one question leads to many other questions and the canned report only provides limited information and perspective.
An ad hoc report helps users drill down into the specifics of why the numbers or metrics in the canned report are the way they are. Ad hoc reports also help reduce the burden on the IT department because whenever a user has a specific query that has not been answered in the canned report, they can generate reports on their own.
Features of ad hoc reporting tool
The best ad hoc reporting tools out there have the capabilities of multiple sharing, artificial intelligence features and BI tools that help in generating ad hoc reports. For an effective ad hoc reporting tool, the following features are essential:
1. Interactive dashboards – Through business intelligence software, the ad hoc reports can be interactive and allow users to drill down into the data and find the relevant information as opposed to a datasheet with thousands of rows and columns. The interactive features of an ad hoc report can include chart filters, time-based categorization, dynamic images and graphs, etc.
2. Artificial Intelligence feature – Based on the historical data points, the predictive analytics feature can be of use to forecast demand or customer behavior, among other things. Predictive analysis is a powerful tool that makes ad hoc reports a lot more effective and the insights generated more useful.
3. Data source availability – Ad hoc reports allow access to multiple sources of data to get answers to most queries run by business users. Ad hoc reporting provides users with multiple drop-down and filtering options so that the information can be compared with other dashboards that use the same data source.
4. Data Visualization feature – Visualization tools are valuable to ad hoc reporting as they can help non-technical users to better understand the information that was extracted from the business intelligence tool. It is easier to make sense of data in charts and graphs rather than data in rows and columns of spreadsheets.
Benefits of ad hoc reporting
Here are a few different ways in which the users can be benefited from ad hoc reporting –
1. Saves time and cost of training – Because the data is streamlined and the tools are simple to use, users can quickly and easily understand the insights generated without having to spend time going through training to learn how to use the tool.
2. Adaptability to Changing Environments – Organizations that evolve at a rapid pace need datasets that change along with them. If such organizations are empowered with the ability to create ad hoc reports, it will help not only in the present but also in the future.
3. Simplify the decision-making process – Ad hoc reporting helps consolidate the data into an easy-to-read format making it easier to distribute across various departments of the organization and the same data can be accessed for decision-making by everyone.
4. Improves collaboration – Cross-departmental communication and collaboration can increase with the assistance of ad hoc reporting so that when strategies are built, all users have referenced the same facts and figures.
5. Bottlenecks are reduced – Internal constraints frequently hinder data collection and reporting in most firms. Ad hoc reporting promotes quick insight generation and thus decisions are taken faster than before.
Challenges of Ad Hoc Reporting
While ad reporting possesses many benefits, it is by no means without its drawbacks. For ad hoc reporting to function, the data must be consistent and integrated.
1. Incomplete Data – If all a company’s data is not stored in one place, then it causes problems for ad hoc reporting. With limited or incomplete data, the reports created would eventually become stale and prohibit users from getting the full picture.
2. Inadequate Data Governance – When handling an organization’s data, many people, processes and technologies are involved to make sure that the data is consistent across all departments. Ad hoc reports when running analytics on the company’s data may end up departing from the standard metrics, procedures and available data, making the insights thus generated inconsistent from the other reports, rendering them unfit for analysis.
