Name: Turning Data Into Decisions: Reporting Strategies for Every Department
Uploaded: 2025-10-30T16:46:06.225Z
Duration: 33 min
Description: Turning Data Into Decisions: Reporting Strategies for Every Department

Transcript for "Turning Data Into Decisions: Reporting Strategies for Every Department": Hello, everyone who's out there right now. We'll give everyone a few more minutes to log on, and we'll get started. And as we're waiting, just if, if anybody's wondering, the q and a is active and so is the chat. We do always ask, and I'll repeat this again. But, if you've got general chatter, feel free to use that. If you do have a question for us to look at, please use the q and a, and, we'll get started in just a minute. Welcome, everybody. We're we're very happy to have you here. I'm Toby Butler. I'm part of the product team. One of your coaches in the greenhouse. Okay? Do you wanna introduce yourself as well? Hey, all. I'm Sergei. I'm a product manager at Agiloft. I'll be assisting Toby, and I'll be taking over to show some demos after Toby is part of the presentation. Sorry. I can't be on video. Just caught in to some, camera issues. Joe Joey is a technology company working with us. Right? Today, as I'm sure you know, we're gonna be talking about how to turn data into decisions and getting a bit more into using reporting features and really how to think about that, in a more practical way. As I said, for anyone who may have joined recently, the chat and the q and a is active. Please use that. Chat is there if you want to post thoughts, ideas. If you do have a question, it does help us if you use the q and a instead of the chat just to help organize and respond. And, we'll get started and then hopefully have some time for open question dialogue at the end. So with that, let me, get my slideshow going, and we will get started. Excellent. So as we're looking at working with data, I mean, that's the fundamental part of so much of a CLM system. While, obviously, workflow management's important, capturing data and making it usable is one of the most important things that you can do with a system like this. And one of my favorite quotes, is from Richard Stein. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. And when I was working in legal and legal ops, I can't tell you how often this comes to mind. It's amazing to have access to all this data, and it can be incredibly overwhelming. And it seems like so many people want so many different things that it's really important to take a step back and think about just why are we doing what we're doing so that you can make data usable. And I think reporting is one of the most important areas that this happens in. So how do we turn this into something more practical? Well, at the end of the day, Agiloft has what I would describe as six main reporting tools. And these are just terms that I've come up with, so don't think these are industry standard or anything out there, in the documentation or anything. But this is a really great way to help you frame how to use a reporting structure in this. Every report, everything starts with a base search. You ultimately are trying to find data based on certain parameters and make that viewable, and that often is all that you need, which we'll talk about a bit later. From there, you can get into some other more slightly more to more complex tools, such as saved searches, meaning taking a base search that you want to repeat over time and having that. You're gonna have distributed reports, which means I'm taking a saved search at a snapshot in time and sending it somewhere. I then can get into dashboards where I wanna use all sorts of data maybe in context with other data, with summaries, or maybe with action items, and have that data be helpful as I'm working through it. And then I can get into more complex things such as visualized reports. I I wanna go export this data somewhere that it can be shown in a business intelligence tool or even something simpler like an Excel display. It's something where I'm inserting that data into a third party location so it can be viewed and used. And, of course, the ultimate one, a full integration. There's times where I don't want this data used in Agiloft. I want Agiloft to push this data somewhere so that my user can use it in the place that they are. And maybe that's a data field, maybe that's a report, but really allowing individuals to interact with the data in the location and in the tools that they're using on a day to day basis. And the lovely thing is with a tool like Agiloft, all of these are possible, and that's what we're gonna talk a bit about today. But before we get into that, I always found it to be very helpful to take a big step back whenever I get a reporting question in and say, what's going on with this? What is my use case? There are many times where someone will come up and say, well, I need a report. I need this emailed to me, or I need this. And I find it very helpful to drill down in that a lot to really figure out what they're trying to accomplish, not only now but in the future so that whatever data reporting architecture you put in place, it's really serving their needs. And I've made a list of questions here that we can start with. And before I dive in, I will make clear, we will be sharing this presentation with you. After this, you'll get an email copy, so don't feel like you need to scramble to write this down or screenshot it. You'll have an access point to this. But just to get started, stepping back and asking questions like, how often do I need to access this? Do I need this to be live and updated real time? Do I want it to be a snapshot in time? Is my search parameter gonna change? Is the data gonna change? Is the scope of data, like my agreement types gonna change? Where do my users access data today? Like, do they wanna come into Agiloft? Do they want it somewhere else? Do they need to see it on the fly in an email? Are they gonna interact with the data? Is this something where they just want a table or even better a graph, or do they wanna be able to slice and dice and search? Do I need to compare this over time? If it's a snapshot, especially, do I need one snapshot and then another snapshot? Are they gonna share this with someone else? And a big one that we don't think about, how much time and resources do I have to create this? It's great that someone wants it. Do I have someone that can maintain this for them? And finally, how trainable are they on the system? An individual sales user, for example, I can say, use Agiloft. The chief revenue officer, I might need to do this for them because they just have far too many things on their plate, so it's better to put it on our plate. Not saying this is an exhaustive list, but hopefully this helps guide a little bit about how you can think about recording so that when you come to build things out in Agiloft, you actually have a very, very clear understanding of the exact use case, why you're building it the way you are, and you might even be able to recommend things to people, that they may not be thinking about. So how do we put these together? On this slide, I put together a bit of an overview of taking those questions and translating them into our six categories here so that we can really start to think about when would we use these in context. So let's start with the base search. This is the simplest. And in fact, this is the one that, believe it or not, is the most helpful, especially if you combine it with a base search and a safe search. So so much of Agiloft is based on being able to slice and dice your data. I've got a whole set of contracts. I've got a bunch of fields that talk about what's in those contracts. What do I wanna see, and how do I wanna filter it? It's really as simple as that. And if you stop and think about that, that unlocks a lot of power for a lot of users. So it allows ad hoc creation. It's easily modified. It doesn't allow you to distribute it. It is in the system, and it doesn't really, like, update. I mean, you have to rerun the search to get it update updated, but it gives you some really powerful tools to look at what's in there at a moment. Now there isn't a summary view, and it does require training on the system, but this unlocks the doors for so many things. The use cases that I use on this are the constant Slack messages. I'm sure anyone in legal or legal ops gets of, hey. What does this contract say? Hey. How many contracts do I have that have this type of field in it? What do I have here? And the lovely thing here is if you have the metadata, by training that person how to go in and use that field and search by it, you never have to respond to those ever again. Here is your login. Here is where to go, and you are off to the races to search to your heart's content all of the contracts you have access to. Now combining that with safe search, this is the next level up. What often happens is you'll have a time where there's a given search that people want to rerun quite a bit. And these are perfect examples of where maybe your, customer success team wants to understand at any given time where are the renewals that are coming up in the next thirty days. Or maybe they're looking at, a they're about to run a marketing campaign, and they wanna see where do we maybe not have, great notice information or address information for a company. We need to find our gaps. These are things where it's a very similar thing to a base search, but the parameters are known, and you wanna be able to rerun it over time as much as you want. So it's got many of the same benefits in the base search, but it allows you to start getting into easier real time updates. It gives you consistency across all of the users, etcetera, etcetera. Now one tip on this one that I found is given Agiloft's structure, don't forget that saved searches and many of these things can be also targeted at individual users. So you can have all sorts of searches that are distributed to different users for their use case, and they don't have to be shown to everyone else. So this can be a really powerful way to take the base search, but help people start with a much better place. And what's amazing is so many things can be solved with just these simple searches. So you don't have to build out complex reports. You don't have to build out things like that. When you train someone to use the search features and use the export features, they can not only self-service in the platform, but they can create their own version of it so that you don't have to go in and create the ad hoc field change. You can teach the individuals how to do it. So let's look at some of the more complex things that happen. Distributed reports are one of the most important things you'll have, and these are the things that are often the bread and butter of CLMs. This group needs a report when a contract is signed. Let's say the finance team wants to understand a report of payment terms for the accounting system. Let's say you've got a compliance team that wants to understand how many contracts have a data processing agreement signed. And while they understand Agiloft, they just want a report. They don't want it to have to go into the system and get it. Distributed reports are your friend here. So adding automation with this is great or even just an export. Distributed reports are where you can create a snapshot of a search and get it to someone, and using a system like Agiloft enables this very easily. Again, there are so many use cases for this, and it's it's really the right answer when someone says, I just need a snapshot, and I need it in my inbox. I don't wanna go in the system. I just need to see the data distributed reports to your friends. Moving on to dashboards, this is a really lovely thing that allows you to integrate a lot of your data together. This is a lot higher touch on the build. So this is where your resources kick in because you will have to build the widgets that they need. But this unlocks so much because now you can combine visualization, which Chang Kay will show you. It'll also allow you to, create action dashboards in connection with visualizations so that your reporting can influence your actions. And, again, I'll let him show that a little bit more, but this is where you really start to unlock power. And a big reminder on these, don't forget that dashboards can be done for individual users. So your chief legal officer may have a really great dashboard showcasing everything they wanna see. Your chief revenue officer might as well. And you can go on down and on down by Teams, and no one else needs to see them. And then we get into more complex things like visualized reports and full integrations, and this is really best when someone wants to work in a tool that they know. They're not coming into Agiloft. They need the data either for visualization or it to be fully usable, and this is where you can unlock a lot of power. But as you can see, there's a bit of a progression here, and each of these can be used, based on how you slice and dice the different information. And I hope this helps give a little bit better of a starting context to stop and think about what do I actually need and what tool what reporting tool should I use in that situation? So with that, let me step back. Obviously, practicality is important here. So, Sanke, I'll turn it over to you, and we can go through how to actually set these up in Agiloft so you can start thinking about where these might actually have practical implications. Right. Thank you. So let's go on a quick journey to look at all the ways you can interact with data in Agiloft. And we're going to start with views and saved searches. Now this is not classically what you might think of when you think reporting. But first, you are going to need this basic setup to create your reports. But also, if you think of reporting as data or information to aid in decision making, there's a lot you can do with views and searches that Agiloft doesn't really put front and center, let's touch up one of your first things. So let's say you have, an insurance department who wants to review supplier or insurance. And what you can do is you can set up different views focusing on different data points to help with that. But in addition to these columns, remember that with views, you also get to configure which fields are important to search on. So here, since I'm focusing on these fields, I can quickly filter on them as well. So, you know, it takes a correlation between what I'm looking at and what I'm searching on. And then let's say you have recently undergone a change to your corporate standards and you need to look at these contracts in more detail when they come up for the new will next time. So you have these contracts that currently don't require insurance. You want to make sure it gets another review during renewal. So from here, you can switch to a view focused on renewals. And, again, you're still looking at the same contracts, but now you're looking at different data points. And, let me just look at that again. And, again, with this view, I have different filters available to me because now my interest is a bit different. Now I want to see which contracts are ending before the end of the year, for example. So not only am I looking at different data points, but I'm also changing what things I quickly search on. And, of course, I can add separate filters if I want them on top. Now if there's a search you're running very frequently, you will create a safe search. But that's another neat trick with safe searches. So look at what happens when I run the safe search to find active contracts expiry soon. When I click at that, of course, it filters to those three contracts, but also at the same time, it's put me into the split view where I can click on a record in this left panel, and it shows me the full record in the right panel. So this is great when you want not just to look at the records, but also dive deeper into them to look at all of the contract details maybe, or or you could even just go into edit mode and make changes to the contract if needed. And you can do that by editing the saved search. And when you go into the options tab, you will see the ability to decide which view you want to bring up when you run this safe search. Alright. Next screen, let's go into more classical reports. So using the safe search filters and the views you create there, you can, of course, create reports which are graphical on Excel or HTML. What I want to touch upon here is scheduling. So once you have set up a report, you can, of course, schedule them to go out to different users. And what's important here is all you need is to have that user record in the system. So you need that person second. You need to assign them to the right close to make sure they can see the data, which is part of the that report. But these people don't actually need to log in to the system, which means they don't need a license. So, for example, let's say you have members of the exec team, who want to look at regular reports, maybe weekly, monthly, whatever it might be, but they don't otherwise interact with the system, you can save on licensing by simply scheduling these supports to go out to them over email. Now using these reports and more widgets, you can also, of course, configure dashboards. And for dashboards, I wanna look at two of them. So first, let's say you have someone in your legal team who is reviewing your contract risks. So we have this insights dashboard configured for them. And this is a really good starting point for questions you might want to ask. For example, you could come down here to see which clauses are being modified frequently. And then you will look up something like first measure and you will think, wait. That's supposed to be a fairly straightforward and standard clause. Why is that getting modified? Do I need to go to my playbook and review the language? Or you can come down here to look at high risk procurement contracts and see what risks you have open across your contracts. You might notice something like data privacy liability. You can fill further to see, okay, there's a contract with Stellar Mesh, one with StataGlobe, and, you have data privacy liability as a set. If you want even more insight, you can click on the widget and then go into this report tab. And here, you will see individual data points making up that chart. And again, from here, you can actually click into any of them, which will open that in a new tab. It'll explain to you why it was why it's a risk and pinpoint the specific clause, with that risk. A side note I want to mention here with widgets is, it's very configurable what you see when you click on a widget title. So here when I click on it, I see a chart and I see a report. You want to try and make sure it's consistent because it's configurable. You want to make sure you're always showing the same tabs to your users so they can expect some consistency and when they click on a widget, they know what to expect. Okay. So that's more of an overview dashboard. Say you have somebody else from the legal department who is logging in from more of law with more of an operational focus. And that's another feature of dashboards. You can split them across, like, strategic dashboards and more tactical dashboards. So this one is more action focused. And here, I'm looking at my things that are pending with me, but also I'm using numeric summaries sprinkled across the dashboard to put this data into more context. So a couple of things you want to keep in mind when configuring dashboards. One, you don't want to mix your overviews and your action items. So here you can see we have split dashboards across, like, insights and action items and other categories. Also, your dashboards are controlled by Teams. So you get to decide not only who the dashboard is default for, so when to log in, what dashboard to see. You also get to control who can see the dashboard at all. So when I click on the drop down, which dashboards do I see in the list? So this is great. For example, if you have a CFO who says, I want a particular view or let's see how a group that's currently focusing on acquisitions, you can create a dashboard that's only visible to them, and also maybe the default for them. And all of this is based on primary teams, and there's no limit to how many dashboards and how many teams you can create. So don't be afraid of creating as many teams as you'd like to have some proper separation of these dashboards between people based on their roles and day to day work. Moving on from dashboards, another lesser known feature of Agiloft is the ability to create combined reports. So with combined reports, you can basically take the reports you created in each table, and you can combine them into one Excel. So here, I have a contracts combined report where I have one report from the contract table, another report from a status time table, and I can keep adding to this list. So when I click new, you will see I get to pick which table. So maybe I want another report coming from the staff table. I can pick that table. And then from that table again, I can pick any support, that's already created, or I can create a new one, like, from the screen. And in addition to, create selecting multiple supports, I can create a customized Excel, which I'll show you in a second. But this is really useful for scheduling. So instead of sending five different emails with five different reports to someone, if you can just create one combined report, so they just get one email containing all five of those reports in the same file. So if you take a quick look at this sample, I have this contract report here where I have two, data tables. So I have a table which shows me how much time the contract spends at various stages of its life cycle. I have another providing an overview of contract data. And what I can do with that is I can create pivot tables and further use them to create pivot charts. And I can create a really visual dashboard. So this one is focusing on contract value across different metrics, and I can use filters here to look at a particular contract manager and Watson does say management. I can also come up here to switch to a life cycle view. And, again, I have very visual dashboards. Again, I can filter on a particular contract manager. I can filter on a particular record type. And keep in mind that this is all part of the template I uploaded. So it's not that I downloaded the report and then I manually created these. I created a template with these already in place. So when I download the report, all of these all of these visualizations are already in place and ready to look at. If you want even more power over your data or, you know, these reports are scheduled. They are point of time, data. But if you want live data or you want more control, you can integrate with BI tools as well. To do that, you will need a saved search. So for example, let's say you want to report on, open tasks. So you have that saved search, and when you edit it, under options, you will find an option to create a URL. So for Tableau integration, this URL is all you need. For Power BI, it's somewhat similar. And then as a data source, you are simply putting in that URL as a data source, which brings in that data for you. And then you can further use data modeling tools to create whatever, reports you'd like. And importantly, with this kind of layout, You can send the refresh at any point to get live data at that moment. A big advantage with both BI tools and Excel dashboards is you also get access to report types and chart types. Like here, you know, we have a very fairly we have a sunburst pie chart or a pie chart with a, split out. Basically, types of charts that you don't have access to. In Agiloft, you can do with Excel and BI tools. Alright. Looking at time, we are almost at time. So let's use some time to see if we have any questions. Thank you. Alright. I don't see anything in q and a. Toby, are you seeing something elsewhere? You'd helps. No. We've got a little bit of a chat going on. Basically, the main question is, where they can get more details on how to do what you're showing now, which, to everyone in there, we can work on getting some of our guidance materials and documentation out for you. And and, obviously, if there are other things you'd like, reach out to us in community or or directly to your CSM. We can get you information on how to do the things Sankeet is doing in more detail. Yes. Absolutely. So the focus today was more on the different ways you should use your data for different purposes and different user roles. We do have guides on how to actually get to these points as well. Like Toby mentioned, we'll, share these details as well. And, Sanjay, we did just get one quick question. And just to confirm, the Excel file that Sanke was working in is actually an export from Agiloft that goes directly into Excel. And I'm Sanke, you're using visualization tools within Excel itself that's based upon that extract. Correct? Yes. So if I can go back to that report. So when you and this is true for both regular reports and combined reports. So anytime you're configuring an Excel report, once you have created the report itself, you get to customize it. To start with, you can click this button to, create a new Excel file, and that gives you raw data file. So if I open that, and I'll bring that up on screen in a second. Not this one. It's still opening. Right. So this is the raw file you will get by default if you don't do any customizations. From here, you can, you know, take your data. You can create pivot tables. You can do whatever you'd like. And then I'm just clicking random buttons for now. But once you have done that, you can save this, to your machine and then come back to that same screen and you can upload that as a template. And you can see here I have uploaded that template. So the next time you download a report, it'll use that template. So whatever pivot tables and charts you have created will be part of the downloaded report. Any other questions? Just checking the chat and getting there. Great. Well, I know we're out of time. Thank you, everyone. Again, as I said, if there are topics, whether it's a deeper dive into these, something else that's of interest, please let us know. We're here to help. Between our technical expertise, industry expertise, we're always grateful to have you guys on and and want these to be helpful. So feedback is always appreciated. And if not, I hope everyone has an amazing rest and end of your week, and, we'll look forward to seeing you on the next live lab. Thank you. There'll be click button to leave stage. That's what I'm looking for. It's at the bottom right of this window.