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How to Create a Practical Crisis Management Plan [+ Templates]
Whether you're running small or large-scale operations, insightful data is everything.
And it makes sense: a BARC research survey revealed that 54% of companies said big data improved control of their operational processes.
It's what separates successful companies from average ones.
You need actionable data to unlock hidden gems, scale operations and edge out your competitors. Or rely on wild guesses or gut instincts, make flawed decisions and watch your operations go haywire.
Operational reporting ensures stakeholders have access to the right data exactly when they need it.
The result is that businesses are able to make the best decisions, optimize their processes and capitalize on opportunities that ultimately increase the bottom line.
Sounds interesting, right? So where do you start? In this article, we will cover everything you need to know about operational reporting, plus templates to get you on track.
And if you're ready to get your operational report off the ground, Visme makes creating your operational report a breeze. Unlock a huge collection of report templates, design assets, and AI tools to get your report going.
An operations report is a document that provides a summary of activities, progress, and key information related to a specific operation or project.
Think of it as a progress report for operational activities happening within your organization. So, whether it's outlining milestones reached, discussing obstacles overcome, or highlighting upcoming plans, managers can:
Operations reports aren't just a status update tool for the people in operations. It cuts across various aspects of the business, including management, customer service, sales, finance, supply chain and logistics teams.
For example, finance teams need to glean insights from operational reports to track financial metrics related to operational activities, such as cost of goods sold (COGS), gross margin, operating expenses, and profitability by product or service.
Both operational and analytical reports are useful in various business settings. However, they are not the same.
Operational reporting focuses on the current situation of the business, including day-to-day operations, ongoing activities and everything else in the pipeline related to operations.
At a glance, users need to know what's currently happening - How many units have been produced today? Is the production schedule on track or are there any bottlenecks in the production process?
Operational reports can be generated regularly-daily, weekly, quarterly or annually.
Analytical reporting, on the other hand, focuses on analyzing past and current trends and recognizing patterns to make future predictions. Compared to operational reports, they are often generated on a need-to-have basis and cover long periods of time.
The infographic below provides a detailed overview of the difference between operational and analytical reporting.
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When managing operations, there are several types of operational reporting you can use to track and communicate operational progress.
Let’s briefly look at these different types of operational reports, along with how some of these operational report examples are used in real-life.
1. Real-time operational reporting: This type of report serves up operational information as it happens. It often contains a rich blend of stats, figures and data visualizations, giving managers and team members a snapshot of either current information or ongoing operations.
2. Current information: This real-time report sheds light on the state of things necessary for operations to run smoothly, such as inventory, labor, tools in use and equipment (including their present condition, parts and warranties).
3. Planning and existing operations: Another key aspect of real-time operations reporting is the actual work that gets done. This report includes data points related to
4. Periodic Reporting: When running operations, periodic reporting or status reports help track progress toward goals based on a specific period. Depending on the periodic, it could be a daily report, a weekly report, a monthly report, a quarterly report or an annual report.
Operational teams use time-based reports to monitor trends within that period and recommend courses of action or interventions.
For example, operations managers can present periodic reports containing sales figures and trends, financial data, production volumes and costs, customer service metrics, quality control and assurance, etc.
5. Historical trend reporting: This type of operational report can be used to predict patterns, identify anomalies, and make data-driven decisions based on past performance.
For example, operations teams can create forecasts based on historical trends they’ve monitored about production processes, resource utilization, cycle times, quality control, customer complaints, service delays, bottlenecks, wastages and more.
6. Forecasting or predictive analysis: Similar to historical trends, forecasting or predictive analysis helps companies predict future events, trends, and outcomes. This ensures the operations team doesn’t fall short of resources to meet their short or long-term goals. It's commonly used with board presentations or reports.
For example, operations managers can easily predict and address the company’s future needs, such as production requirements, inventory needs, equipment needs and so on. Similarly, they are able to plan for future events such as peak periods, demand and market fluctuations, changing customer preferences, equipment failures or breakdowns, regulatory changes, etc.
5. Adhoc Reports: Adhoc reports are customized reports created on-demand to address specific operational needs, analyze particular issues or trends or answer ad hoc questions. These reports are not part of regular reporting routines but are generated as and when required. This can come in the form of a one pager design or multiple page document.
For example, if there is a sudden drop in sales in a particular region, an ad hoc report can be created to investigate the underlying causes and identify potential solutions.
Now, what are the benefits of operational reporting?
Operational reporting offers a lot of perks for organizations interested in managing and monitoring their day-to-day operations.
Find out why your business can benefit from operational reporting.
Operational reports aren’t set in stone. The content of an operational report may vary based on the industry, organization, mode of operation and purpose of the report.
But if you're managing operations and wondering what to include in your report, this section will summarize the common elements in a standard operational report.
1. Title: A concise and descriptive title that reflects the subject, purpose and scope of the report.
2. Date and Time: The date and time when the report was generated or the period covered by the report
3. Executive Summary: A brief overview of the report's key findings, conclusions, and recommendations. This section provides a high-level summary of the report's content.
4. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Present the relevant KPIs used to measure the performance and effectiveness of the operations.
This may include metrics such as conversion rates, lead generation, return on investments, customer acquisition cost (CAC), production output, sales figures, customer satisfaction ratings, on-time delivery rates, quality control metrics, and efficiency measures.
5. Operational Processes: Describe the key operational processes, deliverables and workflows involved in the activities.
Explain any changes, improvements, or optimizations made to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, or reduce costs. Include details on process documentation, standard operating procedures, and workflow diagrams, if applicable.
6. Operational Highlights: Highlight notable achievements, milestones, or significant events during the reporting period. This can include successful projects, new initiatives, process improvements, cost savings, or other accomplishments that demonstrate operational success.
7. Challenges and Issues: Discuss any challenges, issues, or obstacles encountered during the reporting period. This may involve production delays, supply chain disruptions, quality issues, safety incidents, regulatory compliance concerns, or any other factors that affect operations.
8. Resource Allocation: Provide an overview of how resources, such as manpower, equipment, and budget, were allocated and utilized during the reporting period. This includes information on staffing levels, training initiatives, maintenance activities, and resource allocation effectiveness.
9. Risk Assessment and Mitigation: Evaluate potential risks and their impacts on operations. Discuss any risk mitigation strategies implemented, such as contingency plans, safety protocols, or business continuity measures.
10. Stakeholder Engagement: Share details on how the operations actively engaged stakeholders, both internal and external. This may include collaboration with suppliers, partnerships with other departments or organizations, customer feedback, or any other interactions that influence operations.
11. Financial Performance: Report on the financial aspects of operations, including revenue, expenses, profit margins, and any financial challenges or opportunities encountered during the reporting period.
12. Future Plans and Recommendations: Outline future plans and initiatives based on the findings of the report. Include recommendations for improvements, adjustments, or changes to enhance operational effectiveness, optimize resource allocation, address challenges, and capitalize on opportunities.
13. Conclusion: Summarize the key findings and insights from the report, emphasizing the overall performance of operations during the reporting period.
14. Appendices: Include any supporting materials, such as data tables, charts, graphs, or additional documentation that provide further context or evidence related to the report
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Creating an operational report can be daunting, especially if you’re new to it.
But here's the good news. Visme has an extensive library of customizable operations report templates to help you create eye-catching reports.
Whether you’re a novice or professional-level, our intuitive editor is fool-proof. You’ll find tons of beginner-friendly features for design, interactivity, collaboration and analytics.
Start with these templates or browse through hundreds of collection of report templates in our template library to find one you can customize.
This template is a perfect starting point for tracking and reporting your company’s monthly operations. It makes it easy for you to update stakeholders on key aspects of operations like resource allocation, operational processes, timelines, budget utilization and more.
On top of that, this template has a sleek design with vibrant colors, catchy fonts, graphics and icons. The tables and charts provide deeper insights derived from operational data. Feel free to tweak any part of the document to match your branding or reporting using our drag-and-drop editor.
This twin dashboard provides a snapshot of the production and safety aspects of your operations. Beyond helping you assess performance, you can quickly find and optimize areas of concern. This dashboard can also give you insight into what SOPs need to be updated or created to increase safety.
Notice how the dashboard uses color-rich charts to visualize key metrics and operational highlights. At a glance, operations teams can gain insights into production levels, accident rates, employee working hours and more.
With our online whiteboard software, you can expand the canvas and create dashboards to capture other operational areas, such as:
The best part is that Visme makes team collaboration seamless. Your team members can tag each other, leave comments and reply to them, draw annotations and make changes to the dashboard.
Visme’s mobile app makes your creative and collaborative process convenient. You can whip up beautiful designs and collaborate effectively, whether you’re on the go or during breaks. It's like having a portable canvas right in your pocket.
This user-friendly report template allows you to keep an eye on sales performance and make informed decisions quickly.
Use it to provide an overview of the sales performance, including sales highlights, sales volume, best-performing sales funnel, competitor analysis, sales trends over a specific period, etc.
Visualize data using our wide range of data visualization tools, including charts, graphs, radials and gauges.
Even if you have data outside of Visme (Excel, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Survey Monkey), you can import and use it to create your charts. Watch this video below to see how it works in Visme.
If you’re looking to evaluate the effectiveness of customer service efforts, this sleek and engaging report template is perfect. With ample space and the ability to add new pages, you can highlight customer service objectives plus an overview of metrics such as:
Don’t like the overall design, fonts or graphics? In Visme’s library, you’ll find thousands of fonts, icons, shapes, illustrations and other design assets to make your report shine.
This intuitive report template is your go-to tool for reporting your financial operations.
The neat and minimalist design oozes a professional feel, making it perfect for companies in different industries.
This template captures high-level information like income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements and so on. But there’s no limit to what you can do in Visme. So feel free to customize the report to contain other financial data as you deem fit. You can also repurpose this as an expense report with some added features.
Also, create hotspots or popups that reveal additional information when clicked or hovered over. Or link your project to another page, an external sheet or a website where your audience can get detailed information.
Get a bird's eye view of your project status with this captivating report sample. Beyond its visually appealing design and captivating graphics, the well-structured layout makes navigation easier.
The project walks your audience through the current status, key achievements, challenges, upcoming milestones and more.
Put your own spin on the report by swapping the logo, color, fonts, text and images to match those of your brand. Even if you don't have access to quality images, we've got your back. Access millions of high-resolution stock photos from the Visme library - all for free.
And if you don't find anything that catches your fancy, don't sweat it. With Visme's AI image generator, you can generate professional-quality photos, graphics, art, drawings, paintings - just name it. Just type an accurate prompt that describes what you're looking for and the wizard will automatically create and provide options for you.
Assess the efficiency, quality, and other aspects of any production process with this stylish template. In addition to analyzing material usage from different units, it helps you identify areas for improvement.
Although it is tailored to the textile industry, you can customize it to suit your unique needs. Visme’s intuitive design editor can help you transform your report from bland to a visual masterpiece.
When you're sold on the design, generate an embed code for your website or share your report online using a live link. You have the option of adding a flipbook effect so your audience can interact with your report as if they are flipping through the pages of a physical book.
Whether you’re tracking website landing pages or blog performance, this template makes your reporting organized. Having a blueprint like this one ensures you don’t miss out on any metrics and data points
Beyond its contemporary and elegant design, the template has a clean layout with a lot of space you can play around with.
Highlight essential data like site traffic, active users, bounce rate, and conversion rates, as well as demographic information for improved audience targeting. Once done, you can download your report in multiple formats, including PDF, JPG, PNG and HTML5.
Looking to empower your HR team with tools that make employee evaluation seamless? This template right here is at the top of the pack. From a summary to KPIs and visual aids like charts, widgets, icons and images, this document includes everything you need to get your point across.
Use it to create a visual presentation showing how your employees have performed over the past year. Customize it to provide deeper insights into employee attendance, performance evaluations, training activities, staffing issues and turnover rates.
After sharing the report with key stakeholders, track how many people have clicked and viewed the reports using Visme analytics.
Monitor and assess your marketing campaign's performance with style using this stylish report template.
The template features a striking design with images, content blocks and vector icons, plus a cool green and creamy color scheme. The report covers key aspects of the marketing campaign: objectives, KPI measures, acquisition costs, website metrics, statistics and highlights.
Elevate your readers' experience by using animation, interactivity, audio, video and links. And when making notable changes or updates to your report, you don’t have to edit all the pages manually. Use Visme’s dynamic fields to automatically update key information across one or multiple projects, all with a few clicks.
To create an impactful operations report for your company, you need to stick to a range of guidelines.
Let’s touch on a few best practices for making your operations reports pack a punch.
Ask yourself what you want to achieve from your report.
Do you want to identify bottlenecks in the workflow and facilitate interventions? Are you looking to spot cost-saving opportunities or improve the bottom line? Perhaps your goal is to track customer service metrics so you can improve the overall customer service experience.
With a clear goal in place, you can provide actionable insights that move the needle for decision making.
This is a no-brainer. Outdated or irrelevant data will only lead to inaccurate analysis and decision-making. So be sure to base your report on accurate, up-to-date, and relevant data.
Establish reliable data collection processes and systems to capture the necessary information in a timely manner.
Different stakeholders may require different levels of detail or specific metrics to make informed decisions.
So you want to identify the key metrics or KPIs that matter most to your audience. For instance, when assessing financials, top-level executives will focus on data points like profitability, return on investment or debt-to-asset ratio.
Customize the format, level of granularity, and visualizations to effectively communicate insights to different users, such as executives, managers, or operational teams.
Your operational reports are only as efficient as your reporting tools. With the right tool for operating, you can collect data, glean valuable and real-time insights, and tell data stories.
Settle for tools that simplify the process of creating, generating and sharing reports. That's what you’ll get from Visme and even more. Visme has a robust set of capabilities that enable teams of all sizes to manage, report and optimize their operations.
In our editor, you can access 50+ stunning data visualizations, including charts, graphs, widgets, maps, etc. Whether it's executives, managers, or operational teams, you can turn figures into meaningful, beautiful visuals that speak directly to them.
What's more? Visme offers integrations with a wide variety of third-party software, including MailChimp, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and more.
While raw data is essential, operational reports should go beyond mere numbers and provide meaningful context and insights.
Use interactive charts, graphs and data visualizations to share insights in a snackable format. Include clear explanations, trends, comparisons, and benchmarks that help stakeholders understand the significance of the data. Add commentary, highlight key findings, and provide actionable recommendations based on the analysis.
This is yet another best practice that’s often overlooked. A great design elevates the value of your report and gets readers glued to it. Here are a few report design recommendations:
Tools like Visme provide interactive and animated features like navigations, pop-ups, icons, illustrations and special effects to help you create immersive experiences for your audience.
Take advantage of Visme’s brand design tool to create beautiful, branded report designs that match your company’s branding. All you need to do is input your URL and the brand wizard will pull your logo, brand colors and fonts from your website.
The four main types of operational reports are real-time reporting, periodic reporting, historical trends reporting and Adhoc reporting. However, there are other well-used operational reports, such as forecasting or predictive analysis and current information reporting.
Analytical reporting focuses on data, insight and trends for strategic decision-making, whereas operational reporting provides real-time data on daily, weekly, monthly and annual business activities, which helps teams monitor and manage ongoing operations more effectively.
Strategic reporting focuses on long-term, high-level data used to make decisions and keep teams on track to meet future goals, whereas operational reporting provides detailed, real-time data on daily, weekly, or monthly tasks, as well as project or team performance that can be optimized for better results or used as a guide to meet deadlines.
To prepare an operational report, you first need to clearly define your operational goals, then state what data or metrics will be used as key performance indicators and at what rate you’ll be reporting them (daily, monthly or annually).
Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to collect the data needed, collaborate with other departments if required, analyze the findings and present them along with actionable steps for immediate improvements clearly in an operational report.
There you have it. Reports are something you can't just do without, especially when you're managing operations- the engine room of your business. Otherwise, you'll make decisions based on wild guesses or instincts rather than real evidence or data.
Creating and sharing data-driven operational reports doesn't have to be some tough nut to crack. Visme has all the tools you need to optimize your business and operations reporting process-from our intuitive editor to professionally designed templates to stunning data visualization and interactive and collaborative features.
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