By Back in September I wrote a blog of my favorite RMIS reports. I’ve been meaning to write its sequel on report hygiene for some time…and that time is now.
Your report module is going to get messy! EVERY client has this problem. Despite my best efforts (and the efforts of your administrators), there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid this pitfall. At the final reports training for every implementation, I have the ‘report hygiene talk’. I talk about best practices. But inevitably there is a pile-up of ‘Test’, ‘Test1’, ‘Test for Barry’ etc. reports that clog things up and probably should have been deleted, but weren’t. 2 reports created * 10 users * 5 years = 100 reports. I have yet to meet a client that has only 2 reports per user. At some point you will click on your reports module and sigh a deep sigh. Here’s hoping today’s post will provide a few solutions for you!
Let’s walk through best practices and then talk about report culling!
Best practices:
Naming convention best practice– give your report a meaningful name. And even though you love your name, that is not a meaningful name for a report. You don’t have to be verbose, just descriptive of what the report will display. I don’t recommend you reference a specific date (from 2/15/2022 on), since you may change your selection criteria and have a discrepancy between the name and what the report delivers. To help you out here are some examples:
- New incidents this week
- Large losses (ok)… Losses over 100k (better)… Open WC losses over 100k (best)
- GL claims closed this year
- WC triangle for Actuary
- Claims by Body Part – last 5 years
- WC OSHA recordable missing
- List of all Fatality claims by Year
- Policies expiring this year
Tagging best practice: tag your report a meaningfully. Tagging a report has been around since day 1 of Origami. I presume every RMIS has this feature. If not, then move on. It’s a great feature to quickly sift through your reports. The same logic as above applies but tags have to be shorter. I’d recommend you don’t tag ‘Mary’ because one day Mary may win the lottery and Susie will have to either always use reports tagged Mary or go through and retag Mary’s reports to Susie. Plus there may be more than one Mary, so you end up with a mishmosh of Mary Smith’s and Mary Pickering’s reports. Best practice would be tag with either a frequency if you’re a smaller operations (Annual, Quarterly) or by report audience (Accounting, Actuary, CFO)
Report folder best practice: Commit to using and …you guessed it, name meaningfully. Report folders in Origami allow for additional security around reports. I’m pretty sure Riskonnect has the same feature. I’ll double check with my Ventiv friends.
Report Culling:
I recommend an annual culling of reports, but if your operation is larger, you may want to cull your reports more frequently (say quarterly). Notify your user that you’re going to be cleaning up reports – that they should delete their own but you will also be deleting. Every system stores a last run by date, so start with the easy and delete reports that haven’t been run in a year (as long as they aren’t in your Annual folder list). Next I’d look at any reports that haven’t been run in 6 months…not to flat out delete but confirm they are in use. Then I’d jump to reports created in the past month and search for any with ‘Test’ in their name. Don’t do anything more than that and you’ll slowly get your report module spiffy.
And…should you have a user that wins the lottery and decides to leave your organization, add a step to review their private reports and report schedules before their last day.