At one of my clients, we have a daily report that is used to tell how shipments are doing during the month.  This report compares the month to date sales results against both the forecast and the prior month.  This gives a good read on what products are moving faster or slower than expected.  The client can adjust the inventory purchases to control inventory and the online promotions to drive sales based upon what this report shows. 

 

A key with any report is how accurate is the information.  We could prove out the shipments against credit card receipts as one check.  I built in another checkpoint- a separate report plotting the shipments by day. 

 

Based on that, I noticed something unusual during the middle of November.  Suddenly the new shipment information was very small for weekday shipments.  That was a signal that something was not right.

 

I met with the head of IT at the client.  It turned out around that time that a minor change had been made in the main computer program.  This change apparently affected how data got updated to the sales database which was a separate database used to generate sales reports.  The good news is that shipments had been taking place.  It was just the sales report that was off.

 

They were able to make the correction within the day.  Our sales reporting was back up to date and we could once again use this excellent tool for making inventory and promotion decisions.

 

The important thing is that we caught this one early.  We had a check and balance to tell right away when the good report seemed to go bad.  We were able to ask IT if anything changed on that particular day.

 

Would you be able to catch it quickly if one of your key reports went astray?  How soon would you find it? 

 

Consider creating a daily or some other version of your key reports, so you can use as a quality check to make sure information is right day by day.  All it takes is one little change to throw off a report.  Catch it quickly and early so the fix is easier and immediate.