Quick reporting wins

One of the risks of presenting a reporting tool to IT professionals is that they go for the geek-factor; the sort of "wow, that's clever" type of reporting that in reality business users would never use because:

It does not contain information the business can react to
It is not 'in your face' immediate

Often presenting simple, but relevant, facts in a highly visual form gives the business (and not IT users - after all, BI is there for the business and not IT people) access to data they can act on a change the course of their companies.

Take a pair of simple metrics, sales value and cost of goods. Sales value is an often used measure, but it does not reveal much. But if you take away the cost of goods from the sales value and convert it to a percentage margin figure we have converted two simple measures into a metric that can indicate a variety of woes in an organisation. Add in a couple of dimensions to drill on say store and product and we have an come up with useful dashboard report that can help home in the reasons behind poor margins. Not rocket science, it only takes a couple of minutes to create in a tools such as Oracle BI Suite EE.