By Bob Ivkovic, Senior Enterprise Architect
In today’s ever-changing business environment—marked by intensified competition, rapid technological advances, and the rise of AI—organizations of all sizes face increasing challenges in meeting stakeholders’ complex, on-demand reporting requirements. While popular analytics tools like Power BI, Tableau, SAP Crystal Reports, Amazon QuickSight, Sisense, and Domo offer impressive features, they share significant drawbacks: steep learning curves, considerable time investment, and high costs for software, deployment, and ongoing support. These hurdles render modern reporting solutions impractical for many small and mid-sized companies and remain a persistent source of frustration and expense for even the largest enterprises.
From a business perspective, data must be complete, accurate, and timely to meet the business needs of an organization. Business users demand reporting capabilities today that are user-friendly, provide actionable insights, and protect business data via robust security protocols. Business managers also demand reporting platforms with a scalable architecture to support growing business demands, offer flexible reporting features to develop custom reports on demand, and are cost-effective in the long term.
These business demands must be supported by IT from both a systems architecture and application support perspective. This means that COTS-based reporting platforms provide top-tier security mechanisms, real-time access, intelligent data transformation, high performance, and scalability & high availability. Business and IT must work together to ensure that reporting capabilities provide an optimal user experience, robust features and adaptability, and formal maintenance and sustainability processes.
Traditionally, delivering comprehensive reporting solution has required specialized administrators, skilled developers, and extensive support teams—not to mention major investments in database systems, ETL tools, and licensing. The result: high complexity, soaring costs, and slow delivery that doesn’t meet business priorities.
Imagine a reporting platform that reduces technology, personnel, and cost overhead—empowering business users in any organization to generate reports instantly from a simple data file, all without traditional, resource-intensive report development infrastructure.
Introducing Advanced Reporting Architecture
Advanced Reporting Architecture introduces a new approach to reporting. Reporting platforms based on this architecture are fully automated, cloud-based, and transformational (i.e. allow business users to output data in various formats—such as textual, tabular, and visual through charts and diagrams). This architecture supports a unique five-step process, which delivers sophisticated analytics without the usual burdens of time and expertise.
Step 1: Upload: Submit data file via an intuitive, user-friendly interface and select desired processing options. Each file and its associated reports are encrypted with a user-specific key, ensuring privacy and security.
Step 2: Automated Data Transformation: Advanced Reporting Architecture’s ML/AI engine cleanses, organizes, and adapts data into reporting-friendly formats—without altering the underlying content. This guarantees accuracy and actionable results.
Step 3: Automated Data Analysis: An automated analytics engine generates every possible logical report from uploaded data, instantly and comprehensively. Users need not specify requirements—all analytical perspectives are covered, enabling powerful focus-based analysis by filtering on any data dimensions or measures.
Step 4: Access: All reports are available immediately through a secure, organized dashboard. Reports are grouped by data file, accessible in just a few clicks, with built-in encryption protecting received data and produced reports.
Step 5: Utilize: Maintain full control: view, edit, download, and compare reports; build custom dashboards; generate presentations; or export cleansed and transformed data for further use. Everything happens within the platform—no additional software or manual report development required.
Advanced Reporting Architecture is based on a powerful and scalable SaaS architecture, which efficiently addresses user-specific reporting requirements by generating all possible reports upfront. Users simply select and analyze the views that matter most to them.
The Advanced Reporting Architecture’s SaaS platform is built for global reach and enterprise reliability, with the following features:
- Modern User Interface: Delivered via AWS, optimized for mobile and desktop, with seamless language switching (English, French, German, Spanish, and more to come).
- Encrypted Cloud Storage: Ensuring uploaded files and reports are always secure.
- Serverless Data Processing: High-precision processing that analyzes user-uploaded data and uses data influenced relevant factors to maximizing analytical efficiencies and lower the cost of processing efforts.
- Comprehensive Asset Management: Support for editable reports, dashboards, presentations, pivots, and custom outputs.
- Integrated Payments & Accounting: Powered by PayPal and Odoo.
- Simple Subscription Model: Pay only for what you use—no expensive licenses, hardware, or ongoing maintenance.
Some leading-edge reporting platforms, such as PrestoCharts, are based on Advanced Reporting Architecture and have been successful in enabling business users to develop custom reports on the fly. Thus, Advanced Reporting Architecture puts reporting prowess in the hands of the user.
Advantages of Advanced Reporting Architecture
Advanced Reporting Architecture has several advantages over traditional reporting:
Traditional Reporting: Users have access to only pre-designed and developed reports, which may omit valuable data insights. As a result, early detection of anomalies is limited, causing missed opportunities to prevent disruptions. Furthermore, changes in report content or data sources require redevelopment—rediscovering sources and rewriting reports—resulting in prohibitive costs and long delays. Often, by the time reports are ready, new disruptions may have emerged.
Advanced Reporting Architecture: By producing all possible reports from the data, business users can assess every aspect instantly, identifying “quick wins” and “early warning signs.” This comprehensive approach enables well-informed decisions after just a single review cycle. Also, every time data changes, a fresh full set of reports is generated automatically. Business users can access updated insights immediately, avoiding costly redevelopment cycles and enabling timely, informed decision-making.
In summary, with Advanced Reporting Architecture, individuals and organizations gain an easy, cost-effective, and scalable reporting solution—eliminating barriers related to data formats, technical expertise, and long delivery timelines. State-of-the-art automation delivers comprehensive reports in minutes, not days or weeks. From streamlined operations to empowered, insight-driven decision-making, Advanced Reporting Architecture is a clear winner for both business and IT.