Powerful Dashboards, Reporting and Analytics Empower Investment Firm's Salespeople

A large Chicago-based investment firm needed to improve their sales performance reporting infrastructure. The problem: Only IT staff had access to data in the systems, and as a result, only they could create reports.

Sales managers, salespeople and other end-users were unable to do what-if analysis or even modify existing reports. And the busy IT department was unable to provide needed information quickly. The fix: make account data easily – and securely – accessible to sales staff, and give them the tools to generate their own desktop reports.

Dunn Solutions Group implemented a datamart and reporting platform, and then built an ad-hoc reporting environment that provided database elements in easy-to-understand business terms. This reporting capability and terminology change enabled, sped up and simplified data retrieval and analysis for end-users.

The benefits were immediate and significant: End-users are able to comfortably build reports, and the man-hours spent by IT creating reports were virtually eliminated. Also, having easy access to account data, and monthly, quarterly and yearly performance data makes it possible to see trends and make sound decisions.

As for the reports themselves, the platform allows managers to create reports with a few clicks of their mouse – a process that used to take days or weeks. Now managers can track investment results more closely, and can use self-serve, ad hoc reporting to discover valuable information and gain insight for future activity.

In addition to reporting, dashboards were developed for the firm’s senior executives to see the commission status for the company’s key accounts. The top level of this dashboard shows overall commission, the second level provides detail focused on a specific aspect of commissions, and the third level contains detailed reports. Easy-to-see investment outcomes are presented with the background data for further exploration