Create Powerful Status Reports for Your SolveXia Processes

Reporting deadlines only tend to get shorter. This is why it is critical to be able to easily communicate the status of your SolveXia processes to your team and management. A simple chart, for example, can provide the whole team with an indication of how things are progressing vs. expectations:

Status reports, like the one shown above, are easy to create in your SolveXia process. By adding a few Action Steps and a Managed Table, you can log critical, process-specific, data every time the process is run. You can log details about who ran the process, when it ran and how long it took to run. You can also log key parameters that were used (such as the value of a dropdown selector). Using the data that has been logged, you can then create status reports and alerts for your team and management.

In this article, we’ll discuss why this type of status reporting can take your process to the next level. We will also share some basic tips and tricks on how to enhance your process to log and report its status.

Why you should log data from your process

While much of the emphasis of automation is in the task itself (i.e. turning data into information), there can often be real value in the data you can collect about your process. Tracking key metadata when your process runs can help provide better visibility across your whole team:

1. It can provide managers with confidence and certainty throughout the month-end. For example, if the expectation is that a process is run every day, you can add a status report that alerts management if staff forget to run the process.
2. It can highlight opportunities to improve the process or potential issues to be addressed. For example, logging the time it takes for several team members to review and approve a workflow item can highlight the need for staff training to streamline your process.
3. It can provide greater certainty to downstream processes - i.e. people who are waiting for your processes.
   

Regardless of your reason, logging data from your process is straightforward. By combining some Data Step properties and a Managed Table to store your data, you can then build processes to utilise this data in reports and alerts for your team.

Logging Data 101

The basics of logging data, taken from one of our help articles:

Start by adding system variables to a Data Step in your process. This can include information like the username of the person running the process, the runtime and name of the process. You can also use existing Data Step properties such as a drop-down selector (e.g. the name of a customer that the report is being prepared for).

Once you have identified the Data Step properties that you would like to log, create a managed table with fields for each property:

You can then add Action Steps to your process to copy the data from your properties to the managed table. Use the Run Query in SQL table instruction to insert the data from each property into the relevant fields in your managed table. Note, you will need to link your SQL to Data Step properties (learn how).

Add the Action Steps to insert the log data to either the start or end of your process (or both where it makes sense to do so). For really long and complicated processes (e.g. those taking more than 1 hour to finish), you may want to add logs at multiple points and record the stage of the process that the run has just completed. This can be used to craft status dashboards that can show progress to your audience mid-run:

As data is logged to your managed table, you will start to accumulate data over time that can then be used to create status reports, dashboards and alerts:

With the basics of logging data out of the way, let’s look at how you can turn these logs into insights and information for your team.

Turning your logs into insights

With your data being accumulated in the logging tables, you can turn your attention to building reports, dashboards and alerts. This can be done in a variety of contextually relevant ways.

For example, logs from a process that generates customer rebate reporting can be used to provide insights to management on how the reporting is progressing throughout the month, giving them certainty that all customers will be processed by the end of the month:

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Logs from a process that orchestrates workflow approvals from several team members can be used to provide a status of approvals by team member, helping diagnose bottlenecks and training issues:

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Doing this type of reporting may require you to combine log data with other referential data sets, such as a list of all your customers for whom you expect rebate reports. You can also configure alerts, for example, when a daily process has not been run:

All of your reporting, analysis and dashboards can be created using existing features in SolveXia. You can create processes to consume and blend your log data and extract data to Excel reports. You can also leverage the online reports and dashboards as well as the communication Action Steps to send alert emails and SMS messages.

Getting Started

Logs are a fantastic way to take your process to the next level, provide better visibility for your team and have greater certainty over your critical process runs. If you’d like to learn more about how to create a log for your process, please reach out to the team via support@solvexia.com.