2 Replies Latest reply on Aug 15, 2016 12:21 AM by Donna Coles

    How to visualise exception reporting?

    Jason Lambert
    Jason Lambert Aug 12, 2016 2:59 AM

      Hi All,

       

      I like to hear your ideas and experience of managing exception reporting in Tableau (or outside of Tableau). What works best/doesn't work to get users to take action on issues that need resolving.

       

      I'm using product data, and have many (c30) exception types (missing price, missing image etc etc) all that will have owners that need to resolve the issues.

       

      My thoughts are:

           -     Barchart vis showing #errors and #parts in error by owner with drill down capabilities to the part level where owners can export the list and resolve.

                Pros - no maintenance on my side

                          - visibility of where the errors lie to all interested parties

                Cons - Reliant on owners to view the report and take action

       

           -     Stick with Excel and send frequent exception reports directly to owners with a request to resolve

                Pros - directly requesting action from owners

                Cons - I have to manually run the reports and email out

       

      Thanks

        • 1. Re: How to visualise exception reporting?
          Phillip Overpeck
          Phillip Overpeck Aug 12, 2016 8:28 AM (in response to Jason Lambert)

          You could try an incentives based approach to drive them to use the visual report. You could ask your tableau server admin to provide you with a view that shows the usage of your report by user. Then you could reward the users who were using it the most and resolving the most exceptions.

          • 2. Re: How to visualise exception reporting?
            Donna Coles
            Donna Coles Ambassador Aug 15, 2016 12:21 AM (in response to Jason Lambert)

            I would suggest to be most effective, you may want multiple 'data hygiene' type reports that just target specific areas eg product errors that product managers care about, financial errors that your finance guys care about. 

             

            They don't need to be overly visual - if there's data in the report, then there's an issue and if you're looking for a call to action, the most useful thing to see is what the issue is (ie the detail).

             

            I have created several hygiene reports and there are people in the business who care about the data being clean to ensure their reporting is accurate, so they subscribe to the reports (as do I) and deal with issues if they're presented.  By subscribing they get an email daily and if it shows no issue, its simply deleted; if there's data then the report is accessed from the email and further details understood.

             

            If your users care about the accuracy of the data they're reporting, then they should care enough to want to be alerted to errors in the data, so should be happy to subscribe.  In Tableau 10 you will have the ability to subscribe others to reports.

             

            Here's a couple of examples of data hygiene reports I use

             

            The above lands in my inbox daily, if there's a red cross in any of the tables I know the data is out of date and I alert someone to investigate, otherwise I just delete.

             

            I use the below to keep an eye on who has a Desktop Licence that is now leaving so I can arrange to get the licence deactivated before they go so it can be reused with no issue.  Its just a list - today it's empty so again I just delete the mail, otherwise it'll just have a list of names.