Static to Dynamic Reporting with Cognition Data Visualization
CLIENT
Ashley Furniture is a top-selling furniture retail store and manufacturer out of Wisconsin.
SITUATION
Ashley Furniture previously relied on static reporting, pulling travel program performance data manually to create reports. This process became tedious and labor-intensive, which ultimately hampered problem-solving efforts for the travel manager. Having to manually create reports also limited visibility to real-time data, where stakeholders were only able to view basic metrics and lacked real-time data insights.
SOLUTION
IMPLEMENTING COGNITION DATA VISUALIZATION
Seeing a need for dynamic reporting and real-time data, Fox implemented the Cognition business intelligence platform for Ashley Furniture.
Cognition harvests and analyzes raw data from transactions, itineraries, traveler surveys, operational data and other sources and then translates the data into intuitive visualizations.
Once implemented, Ashley Furniture saw immediate improvements and benefits to its reporting with Cognition’s advanced reporting features including:
- Easy-to-understand visualizations: With Cognition, static reports were replaced with interactive dashboards for quick and clear data comprehension.
- Accessible metrics: Aggregating all data in one place offered real-time insights into bookings per passenger, agent segment totals and advance purchase trends.
- Advanced data manipulation: Enabled filtering, drilling down and running ad-hoc analyses to answer specific questions from various departments.
- Customization: Cognition allowed the creation of custom cards tailored to the company’s travel program needs, incorporating expenses, transactions, itineraries and operational details.
DISCOVERIES
The visualizations utilized by Ashley Furniture helped create actionable insights, drilling down data to an individual transaction level to see which key performance indicators (KPIs) are trending in a certain way. It increased efficiencies in creating reports, giving quicker access to data and easier analysis. The company saw time savings over 8 hours per month, enabling more time to focus on analyzing data rather than manually creating reports.
More time to focus on reporting also led to improved decision-making, enabling swift response to trends and, overall, a better understanding of the travel program needs. Being able to share these data points efficiently with other departments at Ashley Furniture led to opening communication lines for deeper discussions on their travel program, and ultimately fostered data-driven decision making across the organization.
Overall, Cognition transformed Ashley Furniture’s travel program management by empowering them with actionable insights, streamlined workflows and improved collaboration.
“The reports we’ve created have helped us with everything from impacting traveler behavior to answering budgeting questions for Finance. It’s so easy to use and gives us powerful information at our fingertips.”
– Ashley Furniture’s Travel Manager
