Enterprise Report Examples

Each user is likely to have favorite reports to make timely and effective business decisions and although it is not possible to cover a whole gamut of reports in this book, some common ideas can help you think through practical applications of SSRS.

Score card reports are frequently used in today's businesses and provide information for each manager on how well his group is doing as compared to the goals set for the group. Usually, a score card implements a "traffic light" type of highlight or a "gage" indicator. Values on the score card are highlighted in green when the group is meeting its goals, in yellow when the group is doing so-so, and in red when the group 's performance requires immediate attention. Score card reports can now take advantage of the new feature of Analysis Services 2005: Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

When users are looking to combine a comprehensive set of business health and "speed" gages (score card) and related information in a small space, a dashboard is used to accomplish this goal. A dashboard provides a short, typically one-page, summary view of a business (much like a car's dashboard summarizes a car's status) and allows drill down through the items on the top page to retrieve detailed information. SharePoint is an excellent platform to host dashboards and greatly simplifies arranging reports in the meaningful fashion on a page.

Today, when everybody is so short on time, it might be easy to miss an information point that could prove fatal for a business. Exception reporting is what comes to the rescue of a time-constrained user. Unlike regularly scheduled reports or summaries provided by score cards, exception reports are created and delivered to a user when an unusual event occurs. An exception report removes the "noise" created in periodic reports, focusing instead on mission-critical anomalies. An example of such an anomaly could be a sudden drop in daily sales for a particular region.

Other typical reports include various views of sales (geographic, demographic, product, promotion breakdowns), inventory, customer satisfaction, production, services, and financial information.