In the competitive industry of home installation services, every decision counts. Whether you’re revamping a kitchen or installing a new set of windows, the success of your business is based on understanding your operations deeply, converting opportunities into committed sales, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the crews.
The challenge most companies face is how to quickly understand what’s eating their lunch, who’s eating how much, and then make better, more informed decisions to improve it.
This is where reporting and analytics come into play, offering two distinct but complementary lenses through which you can view your business’s performance.
Breaking Down Reporting & Analytics
Reporting involves gathering data and presenting it in a structured way, whereas analytics is using data to identify patterns and gain insights to inform future decision-making.
Reporting’s primary goal is to provide a standardized, high-level overview of key metrics and performance indicators. It’s used to monitor the health of the business, track progress toward goals, and identify areas that may require further investigation.
For example, a report showing your sales team’s results over a given period gives you the ability to see who’s driving the most revenue for you.
On the other hand, data analytics is focused on exploring and understanding data in greater detail to uncover insights and opportunities for improvement. The goal of analytics is to identify patterns, relationships, and trends within the data that may not be immediately visible in standard reports.
Expanding on our example above, Analytics could also show you the sales teams results, but let you easily manipulate your view to add: variable timeframes to compare, closing percentages, top/bottom sales team members, and even trendlines to visually see who’s on their way up, or down and out.
How Do Reporting & Analytics Work?
Let’s assume that you are using software to manage your business. So, in order to manage your business, you end up viewing as an example, a report having the following items: Sales done, Timelines for projects execution, Material Availability for the running projects and Payments Statuses.
You’d have to view multiple spreadsheets to understand which labor categories are getting the most sales traction, which sites are running behind schedule, which materials are getting delayed regularly, and how your payment cycle aligns with your cash flows. This wastes time that would otherwise be used to make more sales pitches!
Compare the above situation to a real time dashboard via mobile that gives you detailed insights like:
Summary Report
The “Summary” report gives users a quick overview of operations: total orders received, completed and payment statuses, average time per job site, job completion rates by time frame, breakdown by labor category and job type, and orders per store with payment status.
It’s a concise report for assessing performance and planning.
Work Orders Report
The “Work Order” report gives a view of how many work orders you are getting per store, which can be further broken down to work order per labor categories, which in turn can be mapped to which installer for which labor category and for which work order!
This is made possible by the data aggregation, data filtration, and data presentation that is part of Cilio’s Data Analytics Reporting Framework.
These are just a few of the reports available to you with Cilio’s Analytics Platform. The analytics reports can be mapped to identify Customer KPI’s, making it possible for each customer to make informed decisions using key data insights.
Conclusion
Reporting and analytics have distinct differences. Reporting focuses on arranging and presenting facts, while analytics provides actionable insights. However, both are important and connected. Your implementation plans will stay on track if everyone on your team agrees on what they mean when they talk about analytics or reporting.
To experience the benefits of analytics, discover the capabilities of Cilio Analytics, a powerful tool designed to elevate your business to new heights. With Cilio Analytics, you gain access to invaluable insights that empower you to make confident, data-driven decisions.
To learn more about its capabilities and details, visit Cilio Analytics and speak with our experts for a deeper understanding of analytics and its benefits.
