Best Practices for Reporting & Analytics in InEight – Lessons Learned and Approaches

Morne.Kruger

Hi everyone,

I’d like to hear about your experiences and lessons learned when it comes to reporting and analytics within the InEight platform and its modules.

InEight provides a range of standard dashboards that can be customized to a certain extent. However, we often find that different projects, departments, and clients have unique needs—sometimes wanting a little extra or something quite different. Keeping up with these requests can be challenging and often requires support from a central office or specialist group.

With data now more readily available and teams increasingly building their own skills, we’re starting to explore the idea of giving projects and users direct access to raw data. This would enable them to customize reporting themselves and shape outputs that fit their specific requirements.

I’d love to learn from the community:

• How have you approached reporting and analytics in InEight?
• What has worked well (or not so well) in balancing standard dashboards with custom needs?
• Do you have any tips, practices, or frameworks that helped make reporting more scalable and effective?

Any insights or guidance you can share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Tomas

It's great to gather ideas from other users about what has worked for them.

First, I believe it's a significant advantage that InEight comes with a complete set of dashboards out of the box, which can be easily customized. However, I must note that customization was simpler in the past with more transparent data sources. For example, the control dashboard now uses a generic "cost curves" data set, whereas previously, I could select specific data sources myself.

Our strategy is to maintain a single source of truth, relying on standard dashboards and standardized data sources as much as possible while creating very few custom dashboards.

My approach involves using three types of data sources, which I’ve documented in a wiki for my users. With increasing user demand, I’ve defined these three types:

1. Standard and Custom PBI Dashboards: These are described in InEight’s documentation and used for official reporting. All users can work with this type, ensuring no one is left behind.
2. OData Output to Excel Spreadsheets: For this type, it’s critical that everyone handles the data consistently. OData can be tricky for some users, so I’ve provided example spreadsheets. Users must only use the sheets I’ve provided.
3. CSV Output from Control: Data is exported with US formatting as text, which isn’t very streamlined. For corporate views, I’ve provided code snippets for users to paste into Power Query to format the output effectively.

By using these predefined sources, I avoid debates about data and can focus on discussing insights derived from the data. :)