Understanding the business information you require

Driving your business takes more than instinct, talent and hard work. It also requires timely and relevant information. While very picture tells a story, Judy Bell of Quote & Print reckons that when it comes to management information everyone needs to see it their own way.

Diagnostic systems on cars now allow a great variety of performance information to be displayed and reported on by automotive engineers and while I can be perfectly honest and say that as an owner and self-confessed ‘A to B’ person I do not need to know most of those indicators, I realize some are vital to my wellbeing and the safety of myself and others.

An integrated Management Information System (MIS) is the same. It provides a lot of information that may seem irrelevant to some business owners but be of intense interest to others. Not everyone is going to be interested in the same parameters and performance indictors. Some managers go for the ‘big picture,’ while others are vitally concerned about the details. A good MIS, the same as a well-designed dashboard, will provide the details and the ‘big picture’ of a company in a format relevant to the Owners and Managers of the business.

So, what information allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your business?

The perception of the ‘big picture’ for a company differs from owner to owner and from manager to manager. Some wish to see only a minimal amount of information, perhaps trade debtors and creditors aged balance, available funds, number and dollar value of jobs in the last month, and quote to job hit rate.

For others their ‘big picture’ is filled with detail with perhaps as many as 26 key performance indicators (KPI), full financial reporting, cash flow projections and customer status.

Generating reports that do not tell you what you want to know, are not reviewed and acted upon is a waste of time for all concerned and akin to the ‘tail wagging the dog’. However if those reports assist you to assess your business, plan new strategies and see how effective those strategies are over time, then the time spent reading and understanding them is very worthwhile indeed.

Perhaps you require information daily, weekly or monthly. One very successful Q&P user spends the last five minutes of each day printing three reports on screen. He either goes home happy with the way things have gone, or he knows what questions to ask of which staff members the next day. Either way he knows how his business is going and, just as importantly, his staff know that he knows!

Of course, for any reports to be effective the data must be there, and while this is obvious for accounting data, it is not always so obvious for production information. In general this can be classified as time spent on jobs, actual costs for stock and outside work, and job due and completed dates. A good MIS will take all this data and turn it into relevant information with different views based on the perspective that is important to the viewer.

Most importantly of all is the ability to see if the figures of interest are trending up or down – is the company reaching the goals set?


So, to paraphrase a road sign on a highway near you – how fast, and where, is your company going now?