“We have the Romanian balance-sheets in Excel, the GAAP balance-sheet in the accounting system, payroll reports by departments in PDF from Human Resources and the territorial brands distribution is published by Sales on the Intranet. My boss is asking for an analysis, on brands and territories, of the relationship between CAPEX, OPEX and salaries, on one hand and sales, on the other hand. He wants the report by Romanian and GAAP accounts. And all these by tomorrow…”

We don’t like to generalize. As specialists in exact sciences, we don’t go along with phrases like “all companies are this way…” or “all sales people are that way…” We know that a professional analysis takes into account many cases to reflect the diversity of our working environment.

But in the case of data management and reporting we don’t have a choice, because this is the truth. All, and we mean ALL companies we worked with, no matter the complexity and the degree of integration of their systems, had problems comparable with the one described above.

The typical information structure of a company is heterogeneous. Contrary to the opinion of many ERP suppliers, this is not a bad thing (see also the chapter about Interfaces). Data diversity ensures the efficiency of the departments that are using it, as we can’t have an efficient company as a whole but with less efficient departments.

But business success presumes intelligently analyzing, by smart managers, of all the information available, grouped in a global structure for the entire organization.

How do you add up apples and pears and motorcycles to obtain what the boss is asking, namely kitchen furniture?

Does it seem hard? Or impossible? This is what we do. We add them all up and not only that we obtain kitchen furniture, but we obtain it in five different colors, to make sure that the requested information is exactly the one that can bring the maximum added value for decision making.

This is the field we call “information chemistry”. The design of formulae and tools for data consolidation into consistent structures, able to provide all the analysis and reporting capabilities required by a smart manager.

Data consolidation is a service offered by reporting.ro integrated in reporting or Business Intelligence solutions or stand-alone.