The Problem

You know the challenge: it’s time for that monthly recommendation on what to do with the inventory, or to get that proposal out for the next big project or just to meet the filing deadline for a compliance report.

You are going to spend days, finding things on the Internet, copying data from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and matching it with the Inventory records you have in Excel. Then you have to get all the numbers right and only then can you work on the recommendations. You know that a report is nothing if an action is not taken.

So you spend more hours crafting the argument, getting additional data and then after you find and filter the data, you have to process and analyze it. You have all these rules of the road in your head, so you laboriously apply them.

Finally it’s time to generate the sharp Outlook mail along with the spreadsheet showing the situation and then have your Excel and Word attachments backing the data. And then, sigh, you realize that your manager or team also wants a PowerPoint presentation and also the angle has to change because you want it presented to the CFO and also the Chief Sustainability Officer.