4 Unexpected Benefits of Switching From Your Existing Dashboard and Reporting Tools

When you migrate to new Business Intelligence software, you do so with the expectation that you’re getting technical and cost benefits.

But one of the things that prevents many companies from migrating their data is the daunting task of moving from a legacy system to a new system. Migrating from one software platform to another involves a lot of time and a lot of training. Most businesses are looking at a project that’ll cost a pretty penny, while draining resources and causing frustration in the process.

With everything that could go wrong, it’s no wonder most companies shy away from switching BI platforms or avoid it as long as possible.

But then they encounter a different problem: they find themselves stuck with a very old BI solution. By ignoring new and efficient software, they wind up wasting more time than necessary.

Just like buying a new pair of shoes, you don’t know how much you need a new BI platform until you’ve actually tried one—especially if you’ve been using the same software for a long time. Then the benefits seem much more noticeable. Whereas data used to be a chore, now it’s streamlined, simplified, and accessible to anyone on your team, regardless of coding experience.

When it comes to BI, there are numerous opportunities a business can gain from switching platforms. These unexpected benefits are often worth the cost of migration alone.

1. Makes your report repository more efficient

As with any legacy system—but especially BI tools—they don’t provide useful feedback about who is using reports. Someone built a report and added it to the rest of your report library, but because you don’t know who’s using it, you can’t really delete it. Over time you become swamped with reports without any idea of their current usefulness.

Migrating platforms is an opportunity for some much-needed spring cleaning.

Rather than migrating everything, including all of those reports that are gathering dust, you can perform an analysis to see what’s actually useful and what’s not. Migrating is a great time to reassess the value of your content, as well as who’s using what, and which parts are no longer needed. It’s a time to ask yourself, “if this isn’t working, do I really need it?”

In other words: migrating helps you clean up the junk.

2. Gives you an opportunity to re-educate your staff on your business process

Overtime—especially if you’ve been using something for a long time—your older employees will tend to do things their own way. Perhaps they’ve found some clever loopholes in the software itself, or they organize their data in a particular way that makes it easy for them to locate, but difficult for you to manage and sort through.

On the other hand, your new employees may not receive proper training or understand your business process. As a result, they may never learn the best way to do something, or at least the way you intended your employees to perform all along.

Here lies the opportunity. Bringing in a new and integral piece of the process, like a BI system, allows you to revisit the entire business process as a whole, and maybe even update it a bit, too.

Dashboard and reporting software sits right in the middle of your business process. Before you transition the new dashboard and reports into the same process, you can take a step back and use this opportunity to get your staff on the same page. You can orient and train them to both your business process and the new BI software, all at the same time.

Migrating is also a great excuse to revamp your documentation and training materials. Implementing a new tool like BI software, which is so integral to your overall process, is an excellent reason to rewrite and beef up outdated documentation. It’s a chance to turn your team into a lean, mean operating machine—and kick any shortcuts they’ve developed over time.

Click here to download “5 Mistakes Executives Make When Buying BI”

3.  Let’s you resolve any other issues

It’s always better to hit two birds with one stone. Migrating your dashboards and reports is the perfect opportunity to solve any outstanding problems or issues in your business process or elsewhere.

In general, there’s always a big persistent issue in any process or organization that no one wants to tackle. Maybe it’s a limitation in your old BI system, something even bigger that’s been unnecessarily draining resources, lowering morale, or suppressing productivity. The BI migration process gives you an opportunity to look at any critical restraints in your own business that have been too painful to or time-consuming to tackle.

When you switch BI platforms, you’re already expending time and energy to migrate reports and redo your training materials. So why not utilize the energy and attention that you’re using to deploy new BI software to tackle any problems that are draining your organization at the same time? It’s a win/win.

4. Refines communication and boosts employee morale

Migration doesn’t need to be a dreaded experience. In fact, you can use it to revamp the way you communicate with your entire organization. You can even integrate fun activities that boost morale while switching to a new system.

All too often, large organization find themselves in a rut. They have to force a channel of communication with their staff rather than engaging in a natural, team-oriented dialogue. Whether it’s boring status meetings or boring team updates and emails, the messages you try to communicate become a sort of dreaded call-sign. Their repetitiveness not only becomes predictable, but your communication risks being ignored.

Since switching BI platforms is both critical to your process and to improving productivity and business, you’ve got something exciting to talk about. Use the migration process as an opportunity to reestablish communication with your staff and boost morale. For example, you can run contests and games that encourage the usage and adoption of your new BI system. Or you can have a celebration to mark the end of a training session. These new events can be used as effective morale boosters, in which boring meetings become engaging staff parties.

Bottom line

The fear of a business intelligence migration is difficult to get over.

Migrating is never fun. It requires time and resources to plan properly. But, at the same time, it can be an excellent opportunity to break the steady-state mold you’ve found yourself in to improve communication and morale. Besides all of the technical and cost-saving benefits that come with the new software itself, it’s an opportunity to clean up your data, reeducate your team, and improve your business process.

Yurbi helps ease the migration process while enabling you to take advantage of these unexpected benefits.

A key feature you have with Yurbi during this process is our Customer Success team. They act as a virtual extension of your own team. Yurbi offers unlimited support to help plan your next migration, complete tasks that involve data migration, and train your team so that they’re quickly caught up to speed.

Interested? To talk more about your migration needs, contact us or to request a demo.

Click here to download “5 Mistakes Executives Make When Buying BI”