Report Package Usecase
The Challenge
Establish Oracle in the Financial Reporting Cloud Services market by capitalizing on our strength in Finance.
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Corporate reporting processes involve many people in a coordinated effort to publish accurate financial or other performance related information to both internal and external stakeholders.
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The reporting solution needs to support the rigid controls necessary to protect the privacy and accuracy of data, while at the same time support the collaboration necessary to orchestrate the assembly of a final report stitched together from many supporting documents.
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User experiences throughout this process vary tremendously based on one’s role. For example, Executive Report Owners who are responsible for a report’s structure and its review process have a much different experience than executives with final sign off authority who are not involved in the report construction at all, but are legally held accountable for the information within it.
The Goals
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Deliver a secured, collaborative and process driven service for creating, publishing and filing financial and management reporting that includes numeric and textual content.
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Ensure that the process is highly scrutinized through iterative and collaborative reviews and approvals.
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Ensure trust in the published reports through traceable single-source of truth.
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Utilize Web, Office and Mobile access whether online or offline.
My Role
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Member of core team setting vision and direction for the new service.
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User experience lead, driving design direction and responsible for delivering it from the ground up.
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Managing additional design tasks and resources.
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Mentoring junior designers on the team.
Users Profiles
All user roles expected to use the service were identified and mapped in our established user model.
Collaboration Map
Narrative reporting needs were identified in the user model to better understand the relationships between users and artifacts in their context and typical workflows.
Existing “manual” Workflow
Guiding principles and antomies for entities and environments were defined. A navigation model was established. And a high-level integrated and collaborative workflow was proposed.
Proposed Model
The existing report creation process was researched and visualized to identify pain points to help develp insights for opportunities and solutions:
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Manual and unstructured.
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Not traceable and prone to inaccuracies and mistakes.
Proposed Lifecycle
A structured and mostly automated workflow lifecyle, from defining the report package to publishing the report was mapped out.
Iterative Design
Multiple iterations of the design were explored, reviewed and evaluated with end users and stakeholders.
V1
Issues: Lacks high-level status/metrics, provides information that is not needed all the time, and actions are far from tree nodes.
V2
Issues: Busy and wastes realestate using vertical accordion. Also, accordion breaks table flow when 1st or 2nd are collapsed.
Usability Testing
The entire flow was tested with end users and findings were incorporated in the final design.
Final Design
Delivered Results
The report package service has been well received by customers and the impact was measurable:
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Reduced Budget Book execution time by 25% initially, will be more!
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Reduced disparate manual processes to gather data.
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Increased collaboration across multiple departments.
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Provided timely and accurate information.
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Improved Reporting Process – simpler, faster, less complex and more reliable.
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Ability to use Microsoft Office products increased the comfort level for adoption.
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Provided integrated analytics process to deliver an executive level reporting package
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Consistency at corporate & across properties in the areas of process, reports, and analytics/insights
And responded with a redesign to address the issues:
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Simplified and reduced height of phase headers and made selected phase more obvious (tab-like.)
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Introduced a list view as default, with an option for a drill-down folder view.
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Only included current responsibility column and moved the remaining workflow in right pane.
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Provided an option for a compact view, which would persist once user switches to it.
