Harnessing PowerBI: Best Practices with HCSS Insights Virtual Learning Summit

All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Harnessing Power BI Best Practices with HCSS Insights. We're super excited to have you join us. In this session, we'll explore how you can get the most out of Power BI when paired with HCSS Insights, from setting up your dashboards to applying those best practices that turn raw numbers into actionable insights. A little bit of housekeeping, I just want to remind everyone to submit your questions in the chat box. We'll be monitoring your questions throughout the webinar and either answering them via chat on the spot, or we'll save some for the end and we can answer them live for you. So to begin, I'm Sarah Chui, I'm the product marketing manager for our data products and your host for today. We also have our data expert, Michaela, who manages all of our data and platform products and is the creator of Insights. We also have Harry, who is our technical product product manager for HCSS Insights, and he's been working his butt off to create new dashboards for all of you guys to use. So with that, I'll go ahead and hand it off to Michaela. Hi, everyone. It's good to be here with you today. Thank you for joining. I'm going to correct a little bit of what Sarah said. I have an amazing team that created Insights. I did not create anything. Work on it. Insights is one of my babies, but I have some people way more brilliant than I am that work on making this better every day for you to be able to get your data faster, more accurate, to keep your people safe, to get paid on time, all of the things that we use Insights for. So, we're going to dig in. We've got a lot of really cool things to show you, but this is harnessing Power BI. We're going show you some best practices, some dos, some don'ts, some red lights, some green lights that we want you to be aware of so that you're able to self serve a little bit, your reports are a little bit more sleek, they're easier to read and consume and share. As Sarah said, my name is Michaela, I'm the Senior Product Manager over our platform and data products here at HCSS. With me on the call is Harry. He'll be talking you through all the best practices today, and we're just both really excited to be your instructors for today and to share with you the cool things that our teams have built. Let's quickly go over our agenda. We'll start a little bit by slapping everyone's wrists and saying we need to be doing better reporting, and why reporting is so crucial in our industry. Then we'll walk through on how to provision insights. So if you're on the call and you don't know if your company has access to HCSS Insights, I'm going show you how to get it. It'll be real quick, and the good news is it's free, you don't have to pay for it. And then I'll explain how it kind of fits into our ecosystem with Power BI, and then we'll spend the bulk of our time, I'll hand it over to Harry, and he'll share best practices for building really effective reports. We'll have time for Q and A at the end, so please feel free, as Sarah said, to throw your questions in the chat as we go. Our main goal is really just to make sure that you understand best practices, know how to apply these principles directly within Insights, and most importantly you leave this webinar with actionable tips that you can start using right away today. So with that said, we'll kick it off. Reporting and data visualization in the heavy civil industry. So why is it important in heavy civil and utilities to have robust reporting? Well, I'm sure many of you on the call I read a story this morning about someone who had foreman turn in twenty five pieces of paper just in order to put them manually into the computer, and how much time that consumed for this project manager throughout the day. And then the switch comes lately with a lot of things going digital, and I mean with AI and all the robotics in the field and drone technology. It's really incredible the leaps and bounds that this industry is making. But there are probably plenty of you on the call who remember a time when it wasn't like that, when things were more manual on pen and paper, and when bids were made on paper, and you're sitting at a big table writing, scratching things out, and a lot of that is done pen to paper and with Excel and done manually. So with this digital shift in our industry, there comes a massive amount of data that comes along with that. So if we think about any job site that we're on, and you kind of imagine you're a drone and take it up to that couple hundred foot view, and you're overseeing everything, imagine all of the different Internet of Things devices that are on that job site. From telematics devices, to site cameras, and drones, to 5g coverage if you're out in a bigger area with not a lot of cell service, small tools tracking, lasers, concrete scanners, mobile devices, android systems, GPS crane cameras. I mean the list goes on and on. This industry is creating a lot of data, and if all of that data is coming into HCSS, how do we use it to its full extent? That data could improve how we build, how we bid, how we keep track and keep our people safe, how we get things done on time, under budget. And so with this industry that has already very complex relationships between our specialty contractors, our GCs, our owners, Sometimes the intention behind capturing data too can be questioned or viewed with suspicion, or maybe people don't trust data. So if we don't understand how to do this, we don't have the right way to do this, or maybe there's a high volume of data, we want to be able to know what problems we can solve instead of just relying on our gut. To use data alongside your experience and use your judgment combined with the things that we see in insights, for instance, to make decisions from real evidence. So that's the shift that we're really pushing when we push insights. We want this shift to help you adjust with all these new technologies coming down the pike to be able to make sense of all of it, be able to catch problems early, like cost overruns, scheduling delays, productivity before they become bigger issues, Use real time data within heavy job and heavy bid to take the guessing out a lot of the bid work. Right? So you can see your actuals against your bids, and spend less time refining all of that, controlling your costs, improving margins, and then really making sure that we're providing clear performance metrics for everybody. Right. So that's better accountability on job sites that make that's making sure people are safe, that people are trained. So important to be able to make sure that we not only digitize a lot of this, but that we're using it for the right reasons too. One thing we want to ask of all of you, Harry is going launch a poll here real quick, and it's just a short answer you type in. We're curious how is your company collecting data today? What tools do you use to help you do it? It could be anything from we use pen and paper or we have meetings or we use insights, we use maybe direct access or you use our APIs, Power Automate, whatever you use. Maybe you have your own BI tool. I'll give you a couple minutes to just kind of type answers in there. I see them coming in, so yeah, keep them coming. If you would like to throw it in the chat, if that's easier for you too, happy to do that. So I'll give everyone a couple more minutes to answer. We've got answers coming in, so take your time. Let me know. How do you collect your data? What do you use? Someone in the chat said Excel pulling data from E360, HeavyJob, VisionLink. Okay. I got any more. Lots of answers coming in. Thank you. Thank you. SQL, Excel, SharePoint, very popular. Yep. Using the daily time card, running reports in HeavyJob, all very common. SQL, our favorite. All right, I think we've got a good chunk of answers here. If you want go ahead and end the poll and we can see what popped up here. Excel, occasionally SQL. Okay. Great. Harry, are you able to share this? Yeah. Do you want me to just share my screen here? I mean, no. You don't have to. Just do you wanna read off some of the more common ones? We've got Tello from HCSS models, including insights, heavy job viewpoint, HCSS reporting, pen and paper, along with insights and safety committee, JDE, SharePoint, Excel, internal Power BI reports, Power BI and APIs, products, heavy job seeing a surprising number of paper throughout this Power BI accounting systems, insights and direct access with APIs pulling into Azure and Data Mart for Power BI reporting foundations, Power BI various products. Yeah. Lots of different ways. Lots of different ways. And I would hope that the ones that are sending paper that we can give you a little bit easier of a solution because I don't imagine that's easy to share out to executive teams or maybe it's easier to like write down and get information right then and there, but I don't imagine that it's easy to go back and look at over time. So hopefully, we'll be able to show you another option here. So we built this past year, we launched in March, a tool called HCSS Insights, and we built this for teams who want quick out of the box reporting that's ready to use. So you don't need to configure everything extra to get started. You don't have to pay for it. If you're working across multiple products like heavy job, heavy bid, E360, safety, Insights will give you one view across all of them. And especially if you value reports that are pre built for you, we have over eighty of those in Insights that you don't have to build from scratch to be able to save you time, money, make faster decisions when it comes to looking at anything you can probably think of: fuel costs, maintenance expenses, driver safety behavior, asset utilization, all the things. What makes it very powerful is those eighty reports that I mentioned. We have currently reports for safety, heavy bid, and heavy job, and we're about to push out more E360 reports. And so at its core, Insights is a reporting solution built off of Power BI, and it's very purpose built for our customers. So no matter what you need to know, whether it's work orders by the type or you need to track trends over time within safety incidents, you can do it without needing a separate BI tool. And as I said, the best part, it's free to use. If you already have an active HCSS subscription, Insights does not come in at additional cost. It's bundled in. You can answer questions right away. So let's get into the practical side of things. How do you add it? If you don't already have it, how do we add it? The first step is to have a company admin grant access through HCSS credentials. As you can see on the screen, they'll navigate to credentials and then the little drop down that says groups, and then there's an app permissions where you'll see insights right there. And so once they select that for the relevant user group that they would like to provision insights for, accessing the tool is easy. You just go to HCSS apps under, and it'll be on the apps homepage, and insights will be right there. You click into it and you're in. There's the homepage there. Be right here below this estimating operations and fleet line. It'll be one of the first things that pops up there on the homepage. We're going launch another poll here. I'm curious who in your organization, if you're using Insights, who's using it? I'm looking for job titles, job descriptions, or even departments. Who's using insights? If you say we're not using insights, that's an acceptable answer too. I'm very curious how many on the call do not have insights yet. So keep them coming in. Throw them in the chat if that's easier for you to. Someone said me as a data analyst. Yep. I hear you. Safety. Safety teams use it. Yeah. It's we have incredible safety reports. They're some of my favorites. We have twenty eight, twenty nine different safety reports and insights. Project controls manager, fantastic. Project manager, project engineer. Yep. One of the customers on the call is building the roads in my neighborhood right now, and they're using Insights. It's really cool to be able to know that even my own neighborhood is being taken care of by getting the right answers, and the people I drive past every day are being kept safe because we have this knowledge up front, and the project managers are looking at it on a regular basis. So very cool. Lots of answers coming in. Estimators, estimating managers. The point I'm trying to make here is that it's for everyone. Right? Harry, anything different you're seeing on your side? I've got it in the poll to see what the results are. Let me go ahead and do that now. Safety department IT, financial coordinator, but they run the entire system by themselves. Quite a few not using it yet. Data team, financial team, estimators, seems like pretty across the board. Yeah, and that's the point I'm trying to make. It's not just data analysts that can use reports. It's really for everyone, and it all fits together because the data we're pulling in is relevant to many different types of rules, many different HCSS products. So now I want to talk to you a little bit about insights. I think someone already mentioned in the chat the difference between dashboard and hodginated reports. So how this all fits together? We have something called our company DM, what we refer to it as our company data model. The way that that data model works is it uses a Power BI semantic model, which organizes all of your data for reporting. For our beta customers, for those who were using Insights a year before we actually launched, we used something called the reporting database. And so for some of those V1 product specific models, there was an intermediate reporting database before there was the semantic model that helps organize different data into insights. So what you need to know about that is that the way it's organized was down here was based on refresh rates. We're not able to get any faster than twenty four hours on this. With the company data model, eventually we're going to be able to do closer to real time reports, and we're able to do a little bit more in terms of making the data stable and faster, and we're able to make better calculations and get even more granular. So all you need to know is that we made it better. Two different types of reports in Insights you'll encounter. The first is called Dashboard Reports. These are mainly meant to be very interactive, self-service. These are the ones that I said are out of the box where you can customize and create your own reports. And then on the other hand, have reports called paginated reports, and these are reports primarily that we have to build for you. It is because of how heavily calculated they have to be. So they're designed for PDF generation, for print ready reporting. They are highly formatted and they are not self-service. If you do need a paginated report, we do paginated reports every day. So you would have to contact us and let us know what you want. Then we would be able to give you a quote and say, yes, we can do that. This is what it would cost. And then you're off to the races. But we have hundreds of paginated reports that have been out there for the last six months. No, you cannot create your own paginated reports. And the reason for that is because if I gave company A access to create their own reports, because everyone's on one data model, you could change someone else's heavy job. And so we do that for you and deploy something different. As Harry says, you can see what data model your reports are running off of by going to the setup bar. Alright, last poll here. Curious what your confidence is in using Power BI. What the familiarity Have you used it before? Do you have no idea what we're talking about? Do you think you can probably get away with doing a lot of things? Yes. In the chat Jason said you can do paginated reports with direct access. That is absolutely correct. So this is not our only data option. If you want more customizations, we have other options. Alright, so it looks like polls are coming in. We've got a lot of beginners. I honestly love that. I would not have job security if everyone was a wiz at this. So, I'm glad you are here. I'm glad you are here to learn some basics, Insights is a great foot in the door stepping stone first good, better, best model. If we're learning for the first time, it's very accessible, easy to understand. So with that said, I'm going to go ahead and share the results of the poll here, Harry, so everyone can see they're not alone. Yep. So we have what is Power BI with thirty nine percent, somewhat confident with thirty nine percent, very confident at seventeen percent, and I'm a Power BI whiz at five percent of the responses. So, seventy eight percent of y'all are less than somewhat confident in this, and that's that's great. That's okay. We're glad you're here. So, I'm going to hand it over to Harry to talk a little bit about best practices for using Insights. We've broken it down to a few key areas, so I'm going to let him take over, and Harry, when you need me to change the slides, just let me know. Okay. Perfect. Alright. You can go can you change the slide to the first one? So in this, we're gonna be just going over best practices for building Power BI dashboard reports. As Michaela mentioned earlier, there's both dashboard and paginated reports within Insights. These are going to be concerning the dashboard reports. So starting off, we're gonna be covering, in my opinion, one of the most important things about building reports and also a place where many people get stuck, and that's making sure that reports are designed for your desired audience. With HCSS Insights providing access to so many different data points from multiple products, a common issue that I see that people get stuck in is the temptation to try to show all of the data and all of the answers possible into and getting them into a single report. Doing this leads to reports that aren't focused. They're not answering a specific question, and they don't have really any cohesive story in them. So a key part to building reports is resisting the temptation to do this. So a good starting point is to ask yourself a couple of questions before even touching insights Power BI. The first one is, who is the report for? Is the report for a foreman, a project manager, an executive? All these groups of people are going to need to know different kinds of data, and they're gonna care about different kinds of information. And it's also going to care it's also going to determine the level of granularity that you need to give with your data. And then after you've got your audience established, you know, who is this report for? You need to determine what questions does your target audience need to have answered in order to perform their job more effectively. So, you know, while a foreman is going to care about, like, really day to day operational information, how many hours they've been submitting, how do they compare against other foremen that are running similar teams. An executive is not going to need to know the day to day information, and they're gonna care they're gonna need to know the data at a much lower level of granularity. You know, what is the average revenue per job across the entire organization? And once you have those questions, once you have those first two questions answered, you need to determine what is the action that my user is going to take based on this information. Reports are really nice, but they don't do a whole lot unless they give actionable information and give some piece of information insights that the users can take and do something with. So as I mentioned earlier, always make sure to avoid a catch all report. In the example that we have there at the top, we can see the one that's marked as good is the foreman daily task summary. You can see that the data is very simply laid out. It's just showing what items the foreman have completed on what jobs for the date range. So a question that would need to be answered for this, this would be made for someone who's over foreman and needs to know what kind of information they need they are submitting. And the actionable information that they can take from this is, you know, if a foreman hasn't submitted any data or any JHAs for the last twenty days, might need to reach out to him and say, hey, what's up, man? Like, why have you not been doing this? And then comparing that with the bad report, we can see that we still have that initial visual there at the top, but whoever made this report was trying to pack too much information into a single report grid. So along with the original task summary for Foreman, we also have the total equipment hours across all jobs. We've got the total labor costs. We've got a breakdown of attendance codes. We've got way too much information that both detracts from the initial, like, use case for the report and also just muddies up the screen. So a key takeaway here is to be intentional whenever you're creating reports. It's much better to build two to three more focused reports than it is to try and combine two to three reports into one single report. And then also always sure that you're asking yourself those three questions. Who is the audience for the report? What question does the audience need answered to perform their job better? And also what actions is the user going to take after gaining the insights from this report? You move on to the next slide, Makayla. Alright. Moving on. We're gonna be covering choosing the right visual for the job. Power BI has over twenty different visualization types to choose from, and each one has a unique use case for displaying data in a specific way. And understanding when to use these particular visualization types will help your report be much easier to read and understand for the user. A few examples that we have here on the slide is a line chart. So line charts are best used for showing the overall shape of a series of data points over time. A common use case for this would be showing the number of JHAs submitted per month to see if your company's incentive program is having an impact on increasing the number of JHAs that are submitted. Secondly, we've got bar charts, and I kind of looped in bar and column charts because they serve a similar purpose. But bar and column charts are useful for looking at specific values across different categories. So bar and column charts probably have the most different kinds of them, and some of them get pretty advanced, especially whenever you can bring line charts into a bar chart. But one of the like key other kinds of the like specific kinds of the stacked bar chart. So with this, you can compare specific kinds of data together to compare against different categories. So an example of this would be comparing the average revenue of different business units side by side in a stacked bar chart. And then lastly, have cards. So cards are the simplest form of visualization, but nonetheless are very important. And these are mainly used for getting quick insights regarding your data that can be, you know, harnessed at a glance. So the common use cases for this would be to show the number of instance your company has recorded. In the example we have the actual labor hours, there would be a card on a much larger report. And along with this, something that I wanted to just touch on real quick about visualizations. By default, these will be impacted by any slicers or filters that we'll get more into in a minute on your report. So for example, if you have a slicer that is limiting your data to a single business business unit. These are just a couple a few types of the types of visualizations that Power BI offers and therefore insights, and the number is always growing and always being updated. And once you get more comfortable with using insights and Power BI, you can start exploring more advanced types of visualization tools, especially the maps. You can do a lot of really cool things with those. But if for for a lot more information about when to use and what to use for visualization types, the Power BI Microsoft Learn site is a great resource for that, along with there's countless other resources on the Internet that go over when and why to use certain visualization types. Next slide. Moving on. So this is kind of a commonly overlooked part of building a report within Power BI, and that's the importance of consistent theming and font usage and color usage throughout the report, throughout all of your reports. This seems like a kind of like a time sink, but there's a really solid reason for doing this. And it's the fact that consistency in theming and the formatting of the report reduces the overall cognitive load that the user experiences whenever they're viewing the report. So if your reports kind of jump between different colors, different formatting from one to the next, whenever a user switches from one report to another, they're going to have to put in more mental effort to relearn what's going on in the report, where the filters are, what the colors mean and what data is being presented. So with consistent formatting, you can avoid a lot of that and make process of getting the user getting up to speed with the new reports a lot quicker. Looking at the example on the screen, we can see that the color palette is the same throughout. The title is clearly marked. Everything's easy to read. Everything is aligned. Looking at the slicers there on the left, they go from date, business unit, job and foreman. So they're stepping down in levels of granularity and kind of making logical steps of how a user would want to limit the data down whenever they're viewing the report. A good tip that I like to give people is our reports are made by people who have been data analysts for a pretty long time at this point. And in my opinion, are formatted pretty well, especially with the theming. So what you can do is you can create a report from one of our premade report templates. And then if you want to change the data in there, you can use that as a starting point as that already has your theming built and either, you know, duplicate it on a different page or just start changing the data points within the report itself and then publishing the report under a different name for better context. Just the well, another thing is the grid lines. Whenever you're making a report, there's an option if you go into the edit section of a report within Insights and you hit the view dropdown, you'll see two options that is to turn on the grid lines themselves and also snap to grid lines. These two options make building really visually appealing reports a lot easier and also help with the spacing of the visuals within a report. So just some key takeaways, apply the same color and fonts and layouts across the across all of your reports or report groups and align all of your visuals to make sure that they're easy to read and understand. And you're not doing this just to make the report pretty. It's to save you and your whole entire company time whenever you're viewing data and making data easier to digest. And yep. Cool. Alright. Moving on, we're gonna go over leveraging slicers and filters effectively within Insights and Power BI. So to start off, there's two main forms of filters that Power BI uses, and that's preset filters and slicers. Starting off with preset filters, these are filters that are applied to specific visuals or pages or the entire report as a whole. These are found on the right hand side of the edit screen within Insights or Power BI, And these filters are really designed to change the scope of the data that's being presented. The most common use cases for filters like this is to limit the data to a specific subset that is going to make the report like, make more sense. So something like only showing cost codes that are over that have overrun by a certain threshold, limiting the data to, like, a business unit specific that only specific users need access to, but we'll get more into that and securing your data later. So things like that. And something to note here is that these filters are only accessible to people that have at least designer level access. So if you wanna set a preset filter and then send the report or give someone access to the report as a viewer, they will not be able to interact with any of these preset filters on the report. Moving on, the second main type of filter is something called a slicer. A slicer is those little boxes that you see at the top of the example we have there. And it's just a term used by Power BI to describe a user defined filter. So these filters are really used not to change the scope of the data being presented, but to zero in on the specific data that you want to see in your visual. So make the report more relevant to the user itself. The most common kind of use cases for slicers are date ranges, specific jobs, specific business units. You can see on the example, we have the incident statuses, the job statuses, anything like that is a very common use case for a slicer. And this allows even users with read access to change what data is being shown on the report. So even if a user has read access to report, something to keep in mind is that they have access to change what the slicer is to change the settings on a slicer. And that's a big difference between the preset filters and the slicers is that read only users can change what's on a slicer. They cannot touch anything that's a preset filter. And as I mentioned earlier, these will affect everything on the visual page, just the same as a preset filter. So just a couple of key takeaways again. To differentiate preset filters should be used to change the scope of the data on our report. Users with read access cannot change these slicers should be used to zero in and get more granular with the data and users with read access can change these. And moving on to the next slide. Alright, protecting sensitive data. Within HCSS's credentials, you're able to set specific levels of permissions for insights at increasing levels of granularity on the report or the app access of insights within the group setup and credentials. The three main levels of access that you have access to is the admin. These are going to be people that have generally are admins and credentials as well. This allows users to set up company wide reports. They're able to provision company wide templates, create report subscriptions, that will allow, reports to be sent out by email on a predetermined interval whenever setting up the report subscription. And they'll also be able to edit other reports, so they'll be able to see everything. Generally, this will be someone who has the highest level of access across a lot of products. A designer and the designer is the second one. This allows a user to create personal reports, but prevents them from creating public company wide reports. Something to note is that a designer can create a private report, but if an admin so chooses, they can go in and edit the report itself to make it available company wide. Another thing to note about this is that designers will also be able to create reports from scratch or edit reports that they have access to at the designer level. Lastly, there's reader. I touched on it a little bit earlier, but reader only allows the user to view a report and interact with slicers on the report. Doesn't have access to the preset filters pane and you can't even begin to put a report into editing mode. Lastly, custom. Custom allows you to say either the designer or reader level role access to specific report groups or to specific reports themselves. This is really useful if you have like a very limited report that you have preset filters to only limit information down to, let's say, like a specific job and you have a group of people that you only want to be able to see a limited amount of information from this report. You can provide them read only access to that specific report within Insights, and they won't be able to see anything else. Kind of touching on that again, a very important part before you go provisioning access to any report is to make sure that you are absolutely sure what data is being shown in the report itself. So with the company DM, we have role level security, which means that your business unit and your job access that you have set in credentials will follow you over to HCSS Insights. Meaning that if you have access to only one business unit in credentials, if you view a report as even like a designer, you will only have access to that one specific business unit. But it does not prevent them from seeing like any information about the jobs that they have access to. So to limit that, you can give them read only access to a report that has limited information on the report itself that it's displaying. So just something to keep in mind and making sure that you are only provisioning that you're confirming what data on the report you're actually provisioning. All right. Next slide. Moving on, plan for longevity. So a good report is not, as I mentioned earlier, is not something that's just created and then kind of thrown away. It's something that you should see as a, like, durable asset for your company that you can come back to and reference for a long period of time. And there's some really small things that you can do to set your report up for success in the long term. Oh, just a bump. Sorry about that. So one of the main things that will set your reports up for success in the long term is making the reports clear and self explanatory. I know I've kind of harped on this a lot, but it's one of the biggest things of making reports. So a user should be able to open the report for the first time and understand what it is they're looking at, what data is being showed and how to use it. So this will save you time whenever new users are being brought into the company or provision access to insights and get access to the report. You don't have to spend twenty or thirty minutes with them every single time explaining to them the intricacies of how the data works, what data is being displayed. If you build the report that's easy to understand and digest by the end user, then it should be relatively self explanatory. Another thing to touch on is the making sure your report tabs there at the bottom. Those represent different report pages are clearly stated and they properly articulate what data each page is showing. Try to avoid the page one, two, three and four in the naming convention. And this same rule applies to the visuals within the report itself. Having clear titles that explain what data is being displayed where goes a long way in making reports easier to understand for end users. Something else to touch on is to just keep it simple. Something to consider is you're not just wherever you're thinking of longevity, you should also be considering who has to keep up with this report. You know, if you go on vacation for two weeks and you're not reachable and the business requirements necessitate a change in the report, is someone from your team going to be able to easily come into this report and update the information in the report without having to do four hours of investigation to understand even what the report is about before they go on with editing it. So a couple of takeaways here. Building reports for longevity, you have to think about the two key users, the people who are going to be using the report for the information within the report. And then also you need to consider the future report editor and making sure that they're going to be easy. They're going to easily be able to pick up this report and edit it when necessary. And then also by naming everything clearly and keeping it easy to understand, it will ensure that they're easier to maintain in the future. All right. All right. And finally, wrapping it up here, we have simplified navigation. So this is going to touch more on within HCSS Insights UI specifically. As your company gets more and more embedded within HCSS Insights and you start provisioning reports and starting creating custom reports, you're going to end up with a situation where you have a ton of reports in your report library. And one of the biggest things that you can do is one of the biggest things that you can do to simplify navigation within Insights is to place the reports into groups. You can do this by navigating to set up manage report groups and placing your reports in easy to understand and follow groups. A good note here is that groups can support like a parent child relationship. So what that means is that if you can set up a parent group called heavy job, and then you can have your different areas of heavy job operation reports split into different report groups that all live underneath the heavy job parent group. And this will aid your users in being able to easily find the reports that they're looking that they're looking for. And another really important feature that I want to touch on is the favorite list and the ability to add reports to your favorite list within HCSS Insights. So after opening up any report that you refer that you reference quite a lot in your day to day activities, you'll see a star at the top of the template dropdown list. If you click that star, it will fill in gold, and that report will now be added to your favorite list. And what that does is it will add it to this dropdown you see here on the left side of the screen within HCSS Insights, and you can quickly navigate to this report, to any of the reports on your favorite list from any part of HCSS Insights. So doing these two things, setting up easy to navigate groups, and then also setting up your frequently viewed reports to your favorite list will help a lot whenever using HCSS Insights as a product. And I think that that is actually the last slide that we have for the Power BI report building best practices. Phenomenal. Thanks, Harry. Questions are now closed. There are some really fantastic questions in the chat. I just want to cover a couple of them real quick. Lots of interest in seeing an Insights demo here today. While that wasn't the purpose of this webinar specifically, I am happy to give anybody a demo that wants it, so is Harry. We are excited that you're excited and want to learn more. That is why the team built it. That is why it's here. So, not only will we schedule a demo and invite everyone that is on this webinar, and those of you who threw your names in the chat, of course, but if you also would like to get with Harry or I and ask some more questions, here's our contact info, get your phone out, take a picture of it. We'll also send the slides out. Make sure you get it. Happy to answer any questions. We love that you guys are interested in this and that it's important to you. It is important to us as well. My contact info, Harry's. If you would like a quote on a custom report, something that maybe you don't have the people to make it yourself, or perhaps it's something that is a little bit more technical and we have to do for you because of the way the data models are, we're happy to give you a quote on that. Just email reporting@hcss.com. Any other questions if you want to throw them in and Harry and I can answer any that maybe didn't get covered when we were typing in the webinar chat. If you want to throw it again, I can answer it live. We've got a couple more minutes. I'll be happy to answer those questions for you. I'm going to address Wade's right here. When do you anticipate more E360 reports will be available? Great question. So when we first put out Insights, it was built on the reporting database, so E360 reports were available on that. Then we went GA with it, and we switched the company data model to make it more stable. E360 was not in the company data model. It is now, but now Insight has to pick up that work and recreate the reports. We're working on that next quarter. So soon, hopefully. Mary, Nicole asked a question about how she can see the underlying data driving the dashboards. I know we can see the data tables, but she's running into an issue where it says that HCSS is hiding those data tables. Do you know what that's about? So there are a couple in the company data model specifically. Well, I guess, Nicole, is this about the V1 data models or the company data models? And if this is a like something you want to have, like a longer conversation about, I'd be happy to, like, set up a meeting with you to discuss it further. The behavior does seem a little odd, and it's not what we normally would see. So I would, again, ask you, email us, and we'll take a look at your instance specifically because it seems almost like something's not right. Gotcha. I have to look up in the chat or to get a little bit more context about that. Turnaround on quotes for customer reports should be quick. We've got a team that has an inbox, all this comes in, and they generate quotes pretty quick within a week. So I see that Jacob asks, can we have more financial reporting? You haven't done dove deep into the pay item report and I'm assuming heavy job, but can we have more reporting for margins and cash flow, etcetera? So we're always trying to improve the company data model to fit as many use cases as possible. And as we, you know, we try to gather the most use cases we could think of, but obviously we can't think of everything. So as we get more and more requests, we're always trying to improve it. But I know that specifically for for the pay item margin or profit rather, we have a card open to add a margin value along with a couple of others for the non direct entered revenue pay items. Megan asked a great question. From time of request to report turnaround, what is the timeframe? That is a great question. I want to know that too. And I'm sorry to give you kind of a BS answer, but it's not BS. It depends on how complex it is. So we quote reports that are hundreds of hours, and we quote reports that take less than ten. So it really kind of depends on how much work the team would actually have to do. So not a great answer, but I hope that helps a little bit. The only way to actually tell is to email reportinghcss dot com. We'll quote you the number of hours, we'll tell you this is how fast you'll get it, and then it's up to you if you want to make that decision, if you want to write it yourself or you want to have us write it, then that decision would be yours to make. So hopefully that helps a little bit. Elaine, I would love to know more about the question that you asked about gaining direct access to the HCSS files or tables so you can include that data with info from your ERP. We have a separate offering outside of Insights called Direct Access, So it's exactly what you're asking for there. And if you'd like to know more about that, you can ask me or you can reach out to your account rep. I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you how to get that started. I see Wade asked, will there be integration with Telematics into HCSS Insights? Yes, that is coming. I guess kind of the goal of Insights long term is to have all of the product data within Insights. It's we've got a long road ahead of us, but that is like the long term goal. Something to note with that with Telematics specifically is that the ping data, all of the pings, you know, it's a massive amount of data. So that's one of the reasons it's been a little bit challenging of whether or not we're going to get that data in there. Yeah. And, Jonathan, to address your question too, if you wanna pull any of your data that's outside of HCSS data in with HCSS data and report on it, you cannot do that in Insights. You need your own BI tool. You would need direct access to do that. We give you a SQL connection. You pull that into your own tool, you can mix and match and do whatever in your own Power BI or Domo or Tableau instance that you have. So, yes, Direct Access would be the right route to go there. And then if you have an idea of what you want, but you're not sure what data to use, yes, we can absolutely help you. Call into support, we'll help you out. Oh, Harry, I promised Pancho you'd answer this live. Production related reports. Gotcha. I can see. It would depend on what kind of production because we have like cost code production related reports that would probably be able to give you that information. But I would have to know a little bit more specifics. I know I've worked. I think it might have been one of our roles in support, but I've talked to Pancho quite a few times. So it's good to see you, man. So the heavy bid activity rates versus actual cost code production rates. So for this, this has been something the issue has made connection at that level with heavy bit web and the, like, concept of projects. Whenever we get those added, it will be a lot easier for us to make that connection between the two of them. And that's just because previously, it relied on the cost code activity field being filled, and the data types of those sometimes don't convert very well. So that's something that's coming, but it's an issue with the connection just because the data types that are used between the two of those. So yes, but not yet. Yes. So Jason asked, will that change the data tables within direct access? So it would likely add data tables within direct access, but we really try our absolute hardest to do any kind of breaking change that would affect like any pre built reports working off Direct Access. So it likely won't change the it probably it might change the data tables, but not in any way that's going to break the reports. If we add if if we, you know, have to add a field on a table, we won't change any of the ordering of it. If we have to even if we like have to add some data fields, we might just break that off into a separate table that has a, an ID to link that back to the main, data. Right, I think we are just about at the end of the webinar, so I know there's a bajillion other questions that we haven't gotten to, but I want to close it out for today. I know everyone is super interested in a demo and more information about insights, which is fantastic to hear. So I'll go ahead and work with Michaela and Harry as soon as we can to get a demo out to you guys. And I'll be sure to include everyone on this webinar because it sounds like everyone is really interested in that. If we can flip to the next slide. I want to remind everyone that we also have HCSS Academy which also has some additional learning courses that you can go through for not only insights but also heavy bid, heavy job, and fleet. If you want to learn more there's step by step courses that you can use on your own time, But we will be sure to put out more webinars and demos on Insights specifically. Fantastic interest. Thank you all for being here. Is there an additional slide? There we go. There you go. And then last but not least, if you need any additional assistance, feel free to reach out to anyone here on this webinar. And then we also have our support numbers and our help site listed here. So I just want to close it out and say thank you all for being here. Please keep a lookout, I will send an email to all of you regarding this webinar. You'll have the recording and the slides in addition to information on when we will have that demo ready for you guys. So thank you so much for coming and we'll see you next time. Bye everyone. Thank you all. Bye all.