Insights vs Reporting.

There is a lot of confusion around these two words: Reporting and Insights. In this article, I have taken promotion concept to explain the difference between Insights vs Reporting.

Insights

Insight is the beautiful last stage of data. Insights brings understanding. Experienced people reach this phase. But when they do, it creates miraculous amount of understanding and well, insight into the organizations.

Insight is the cumulation of lots of analysis of the data over time. Here one should understand the business end to end to provide the actionable results.

Ex: The following promotion visualization provides the information of different Multi-Buy promo's behavior with two different segments.

1. At the category level, bundled vs non-bundled promotions.

2. On savings-type, bundled vs non-bundled promotions.

On the below of these two visualizations, I have added the crosstab section when the user clicks on to the selective bar chart it will show the relevant data at the lowest granularity. By doing this the category manager or the respective authorized department can be well prepared to take the necessary actions by excluding the non-performing sub-category combination with different subcategories or deep dive into other aspects of analysis in respect to operations or other areas.

Reporting

Reporting is the first step of working with data when it comes to data analytics. Reporting is really about the collection, transforming and organizing of data points to start the story telling process.

Ex:

The following Promo Visualization Report, provides the overview of the number of items sold on different kinds of promo-type and its savings type followed by the comparison of units sold with and without the promotions. Here the report consumers can see how well the promotions are performing but they can't take any actions on it.

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Thank you.