Do you ever feel like you need a Crystal Ball to analyze and understand your business data? Well, we can’t give you a crystal ball but maybe what you really need are Crystal Reports. At Olive Branch IT, we can help you and your employees make sense of your data and present it efficiently using Crystal Reports. You may be wondering, “What are these mythical and powerful Crystal Reports of which you speak?” …. ok so that’s probably not EXACTLY what you’re thinking but let’s go with this jazzy version. ;-) Crystal Reports is a type of Business Intelligence application used to aggregate data from multiple sources and then it generates reports. Ahhhhh, that explains it… you say while shaking your head left to right….. Well, maybe we should explain a little more.
Today’s businesses, small and large, have the capacity to collect and maintain tons of data. Many times this data is in different forms and collected in different places then stored in different programs. Unless you have a talent for working with raw numbers and data like the character Raymond in the movie “Rainman,” (the Dustin Hoffman character, not the Tom Cruise guy) you may be overwhelmed trying to make informed decisions based on this information. Have you heard of “paralysis by analysis”? If you can take action quicker based on clearer presentations of your data…. THAT is a great thing!
Our goal is to help you improve productivity and profitability with technology. We can use Crystal Reports to graphically design data connections and report layouts according to what you want to look for or see with your data. Are you trying to understand certain trends or pick up on correlations to evaluate your sales or inventory practices? These reports can make such tasks much easier to complete. We can create fields and formulas tied to different data sources within reports according to what you want to see related to a specific business need or problem. These have a variety of formatting options we can discuss as well. In addition to controlling the conditionality of the formulas, Crystal Reports can generate groups, subgroups and graphs as well. Did you think drillable dashboards were out of reach for your small business? Not true!
Begin to imagine all of the ways simplified graphic reports could positively impact your business. Internally: Can you search for high traffic times to adjust scheduling or order more inventories? Externally: Could your sales team use reports to quickly illustrate advantages to their customers? Really the possibilities are endless and we can help you make it REAL!
Think about the role of infographics and data visualization in our society today. Why is it so rampant? …. Because the visual representations are effective. When information is presented graphically and in more simplified forms, people make sense of it faster, remember it longer, and just plain like it better. Using Crystal Reports we can help you get the most from your data, you can save your wish for the Crystal Ball for other things, like figuring out if rain will spoil your golf game!