It’s Friday afternoon and you have just received a request for a specific report outside of the normal reporting requirements. You spend the next few hours using Excel or Access to pull together data from exports and ODBC drivers, only for the report or data extraction to be subsequently forgotten after it has been produced.
This type of request is not unusual for most businesses. It could be information for a specific tender or ad hoc analysis of a specific business event. Typically, a business will have a number of these requests and they may be used again later, however, because they are ad hoc in nature, their construction method is typically ad hoc as well, so they are not maintained for future use.
So, how can an integration platform like Statelake help with creating and managing ad-hoc data extraction and reporting?
Statelake’s ability to connect to multiple data sources makes it an ideal tool to extract data from a multitude of applications across an organisation. The data can then be rationalised in Statelake by applying specific rules or mapping and the output is sent to an Excel file, SQL database or printed out in the form of a report.
As these ad-hoc projects are stored in one place – Statelake’s centralised data hub – with any new requests you can quickly check to see if it has been done before and just rerun the project or copy and modify an existing one instead of starting from scratch.
If an ad-hoc request becomes so regular that in fact, it becomes a standard business process, the Statelake action can be set up to run at the frequency you choose.
So, in the future, the valuable time spent creating these data extract projects will not be lost in the un-managed domain of Excel sheets and Access databases, but instead be stored in one place for future use and reference.
