This blog post has been updated as of May 4th, 2021
Several years ago I was at a customer site and there were two executives who were struggling to figure out if a field they recently purchased was producing as much as they were expecting.
They had over fifty reports in their system, but they didn't know where to look. It didn't help that they had multiple systems and each one had slightly different numbers. Everything this company did was electronic-based and they collected so much data that obviously they had this information somewhere. The big question, though, was where do you look?
Over the last several years most production companies have gone paperless. What used to be tracked on paper is now being entered into software. As more processes have been made digital, or automated this is leading to an ever increasing amount of data being stored.
All this stored data has led to a phenomenon called big data.
Big data is where there is simply too much information in so many systems that it is confusing and costly trying to keep it organized. You would be surprised how some companies even refuse to look at reports as they don't trust any of the numbers.
People need to make sense from all that big data nonsense. That's where our cloud platform comes into play. Sometimes, analysts are hired to review systems and provide one-time reports, but that is very costly and is only a short-term solution. Companies have turned more and more to automatically updated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) dashboards that give them a focused look into how well their company is operating.
Executives don't need to know where the data is coming from or how it is organized. Frankly, it doesn't matter. These KPI dashboards are designed to directly answer common, but very important business questions fairly easily. And most importantly, it needs to be graphical. People need to be able to look at it and say "oh now I see where the problem is". This is the value of KPI dashboards. They cut straight to the point and give executives and managers the answers they need, now.
It's like having an analyst in a box, but better!
