Gain greater insights from your data – quickly and easily
Do you need to:
- Pull together data from different systems or spreadsheets for consolidated reporting?
- Cleanse and curate that data to produce department-specific reports and visuals based on one version of the truth?
- Produce operational reports based on real-time data that users can interact with on their own and easily collaborate with others across the organization?
This is not easy with Excel because:
- Data from other systems is not updated automatically within Excel. As a result, significant administrative effort is required to pull together disparate but related information. It’s also not uncommon for different teams to produce different answers to the same question due to the lack of a single source of truth and weak data governance.
- Excel does not provide for convenient collaboration across teams in different departments. You could spend many hours distributing dozens of Excel spreadsheets to different groups.
- You’re limited in the amount of data you can pull into a single Excel document.
Excel often takes a lot of time and effort to combine different data points or files within spreadsheets to build reports. It can take multiple days to complete each report. Fortunately, that approach is no longer necessary because with Informer, Entrinsik’s data analytics and BI platform, you can have one large curated Dataset where you can easily slice and dice the data and quickly create visuals for more comprehensive analysis.
Informer customers, who previously used Excel’s pivot tables, are also amazed with Informer 5’s ease of pivoting on data, its speed, and the ability to explore data in almost limitless ways.
Informer 5 is a much better alternative
Imagine having real-time operational information from multiple sources of data on one screen.
Regardless of one’s technical ability, Informer 5 makes it easy to explore data and create ad-hoc reports and dashboards.
Informer 5 radically simplifies the process of accessing, cleansing, blending, and analyzing disparate data by providing a single platform to create a cohesive, curated, governed data hub for self-service reporting across your organization. You can pull data from over a dozen data sources including, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server®, Oracle®, IBM DB2®, MySQL, Informix®, UniData, FileMaker®, etc., and large spreadsheets, and consolidate them within Informer’s data hub. And, because you’re starting from a common baseline of curated data – a Dataset within Informer – self-service reporting errors are minimized.
Informer as a data cleansing and error-checking tool
To eliminate rows containing incorrect information, some people need to take the data that resides within their reporting tool and transfer it into Excel for cleansing. However, there is a much better way! One of the common uses of Informer is to find bad data in a database and clean it up.
Informer can also be used as an error-checking tool where abnormalities in data patterns can be spotted. This opens the opportunity for more investigative questions to be asked.
Analysis and reporting made easy with Informer 5
Informer Dashboards make it convenient for you to drill down into the overwhelming amount of data that your organization produces every day so you can easily get answers to specific questions and gain new insights. From there, you can further visualize and analyze the data to find answers to additional questions and make real-time data-driven decisions.
If you want to compare information, Informer’s Comparison Boards simplify comparative analysis of segments of data against others, or against the whole, by comparing left-column Visuals with right-column Visuals.
James Slizewski, registrar at Delaware Valley University, has been assisting the University’s academic leaders and department staff with operational reporting for over five years. He understands that managers don’t like looking at spreadsheets but instead they want to see data presented visually. According to Slizewski, “Informer 5 enables academic leaders and users to view things that they didn’t know previously by looking at a spreadsheet.”
Use the data you are seeing with Informer Dashboards
Informer 5 Dashboards facilitate the interaction with data by enabling users to quickly drill down into the details to glean greater insight. These Dashboards enable the University’s academic leaders and staff to easily see, daily, if they are meeting key institutional metrics.
“If a department looks at a dashboard one way and wants to visualize the data a different way, we give them the ability to do that. What’s so beneficial is that they can use the data they are seeing. For example, they can filter on students who have high GPAs, click on that visual, view the data that includes an email address, download the data and send out an email just to those students. They can do all of this within Informer, you don’t need anything else! As compared to how we had to do it before, where we had to run the whole report, download it, and then filter it within Excel or something, said Slizewski.
You can easily create your own Informer Dashboard to be a powerful, personalized resource that displays reports you typically create more than once. Dashboards integrate data from multiple databases, data warehouses, and spreadsheets, and display visualizations using real-time data. Prior to bringing Informer 5 into Delaware Valley University, staff in various departments didn’t have direct access to up-to-date information to make informed decisions. Instead, they had to ask the registrar’s office or IT to run reports for them.
Teams of users are empowered with Informer 5 Teams
According to Slizewski, “What’s nice about Informer 5 Dashboard reports is that they can be created and pushed out to a team of users. Those users can then own that report and can manipulate it and run it in other ways. They can add their own data in and even add in other datasources. Whereas before, they had to massage that data in after the fact in Excel. So, it’s allowed those teams of people to not only design and run reports, but also use other sources of data that weren’t available to the report writers before”.
To watch James Slizewski’s customer testimonial video and learn more, click here.
To learn more, call 888-703-0016, or informersales@entrinsik.com
