Originally posted on https://www.inzata.com/adhoc-reporting-ad-hoc-reporting/

 

If you heard someone using the term “ad-hoc reporting” for the first time, you might think they’re using another language, or are at least missing a few letters.  Well, that’s partly true.

Ad-hoc is Latin for “as the occasion requires.”  When you see “ad-hoc,” think “on-the-fly”. Ad-hoc reporting is a model of business intelligence (BI) in which reports are created and shared on-the-fly, usually by nontechnical business intelligence users. These reports are often done with a single specific purpose in mind, such as to provide data for an upcoming meeting, or to answer a specific question.

Under the ad-hoc model, users can use their reporting and analysis solution to answer their business questions “as the occasion requires,” without having to request help from a technology specialist. A key feature of ad-hoc reporting is that it enables, and embodies, self-service BI in most enterprises. Ad-hoc reports can be as simple as a one page data table or as complex and rich as interactive tabular or cross-tab reports with drill-down and visualization features–or present themselves in the form of dashboards, heat maps, or other more advanced forms.

With ad-hoc reports, all the technical user does is set up the BI solution, ensure the data is loaded and available, set security parameters and give the users their account logins. From that point on, the actual reports are created by business end-users.

Ad-hoc reporting stands in contrast with managed reporting, where the technical user–the report developer–creates and distributes the report. As you may have guessed already, if your BI tool of choice supports ad-hoc reports, it will be a big time saver for your technical report developers.

Who Uses These Types of Reports?

This depends in large part on a) the type of ad-hoc solution employed, b) the needs of the end-user and c) the user’s confidence with the solution.

The most common creators of ad-hoc reports are business users and departmental data analysts. In some BI shops, ad-hoc reporting access can be shared outside the organization with business partners and outside auditors, who may need secure access to this information.

What is Ad-Hoc Analysis Used For?

Ad hoc analysis is performed by business users on an as-needed basis to address data analysis needs not met by the business’s established, recurring reporting that is already being produced on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. The benefits of self-service BI conducted by ad hoc analysis tools include:

• More current data: Ad hoc analysis may enable users to get up-to-the-minute insights into data not yet analyzed by a scheduled report.
• New reports produced in record time: Since these reports may be single-use, you want to produce them as inexpensively as possible. Ad-hoc report features in a BI tool allow users to sidestep the lengthy process that can go into a normal report, including design work, development, and testing.
• Line-of-business decisions can be made faster: Allowing users — typically, managers or executives — access to data through a point-and-click interface eliminates the need to request data and analysis from another group within the company. This capacity enables quicker response times when a business question comes up, which, in turn, should help users respond to issues and make business decisions faster.
• IT workload reduction: Since ad hoc reporting enables users to run their own queries, IT teams field fewer requests to create reports and can focus on other tasks.

Although most ad hoc reports and analyses are meant to be run only once, in practice, they often end up being reused and run on a regular basis. This can lead to unnecessary reporting processes that affect high-volume reporting periods. Reports should be reviewed periodically for efficiencies to determine whether they continue to serve a useful business purpose.

The Goal of Ad-hoc Report Creation

Ad-hoc reporting’s goal is to empower end-users to ask their own questions of company data, without burdening IT with the task of creating a myriad of reports to serve different functions and purposes. Ad-hoc reporting therefore makes the most sense when a large number of end-users need to see, understand, and act on data more or less independently, while still being on the same page as far as which set of numbers they look at.

For example, a company with a large outside sales force would be the perfect fit for ad-hoc reporting. Each sales rep can set up his own report for his territory, showing performance against sales goals, orders taken, number of visits to each client, etc., in a format that makes the most sense to him. And just as importantly, the numbers used are pulled from the same data sources as the rest of the company, thereby promoting consistency and minimizing surprises at the end of the quarter.

Benefits of a Web-based Solution

Get critical information to the right people at the right time – Self-service results plus automatic scheduling/delivery of information let you facilitate timely decision making. Users get the information they need when they need it to answer critical, real-time questions.

Flexibility for constantly changing environments – Business needs to evolve. Answers to changing business questions become more critical. It’s impossible to predict what questions and answers users may need in the future.

Saves training costs and time – Streamlines users’ access to critical information. Easy-to-use wizards allow users to get up and running quickly, requiring less time to learn the application and providing clear guidance and saving time to build reports.

Encourages collaboration and information sharing – Users can easily create, organize, publish and make reports available to other users via the Web for on-demand viewing.

Reduces IT workload – The Web-based reporting application itself can be deployed quickly for widespread availability to end-users. Once deployed, it empowers users to build the reports themselves anytime they need the information. No waiting for IT report developers to build them.

What to Look For in a Good Ad-hoc Report Solution

Now that you have an understanding of what ad-hoc reports are, a good reporting solution should tick all of the specific boxes in your feature list. It should be intuitive and easy to use by both business users and technologists. It should be broadly accessible with a light footprint so that many people can access it. It should be able to deliver the answers to users questions quickly and cleanly. In short, it should be oriented toward self-service BI and should be lightweight, fast, and easy to use.

A good reporting solution will offer the following characteristics:

Easy to use. If it is or even appears to be complicated, many end-users will be turned off and user adoption will suffer. For this reason, some of the better ad-hoc solutions available today offer a basic set of intuitive features that are wizard-driven and will look easy even to the proverbial “non-computer person,” while also offering more advanced sets of tools for the user who feels confident.

Robust. Assuming that adoption is not an issue (see the previous point), the ad-hoc solution should offer end-users what they need to see, understand and act upon their data. Far from being a more hi-tech version of Excel, it should offer interactive features like ad-hoc dashboards, drill-down and drill-through, advanced sorting and filtering, rich visualization tools like heat maps, charts and graphs, etc.

Widely accessible. For it to be truly useful, a BI solution (including ad-hoc reporting) should web-delivered and accessible with a browser. Apart from offering familiar navigability, and security, a Web-based solution is available from virtually anywhere and on any device via Internet connection. Another benefit of a Web-based ad-hoc solution is that the system administrator won’t have to set it up individually on every user’s machine: installing it on the server is enough, and all the users need to access it is a simple URL.

Today’s better Web-based ad-hoc solutions are data-source neutral, meaning that they can connect practically out of the box to most of today’s commonly-used data-sources, including databases, Web-services, flat files, etc. This saves the IT department the burden of creating complex metadata structures as the underlying layer, which is time-consuming, cumbersome and expensive.

https://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/ad-hoc-analysis

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30294/ad-hoc-reporting