Wouldn’t it be nice if your reports and memos had system trays? If they did, then critical information would jump out at us and extra detail would be just a click away. Today, finding critical information in even a one page executive summary can be a chore. Just imagine getting 5-plus pages of dense spreadsheet data dropped in your inbox. In general, gleaning useful information from printouts seems to require a green eyeshade and infinite time and patience.

Summaries may obscure data

I am not trying to convince you that your reports have too much information, or that we need more summaries and executive overviews. In my experience, most reports have too little information for people to make good decisions. The purpose of a summary is to find problems or opportunities quickly, but more often summaries obscure the numbers you need to see. For example, let’s take the numbers 8, 5, 6, 1, and 5. The summary (average) of this is 5, which tells you nothing. Even if I showed you all the numbers they still mean nothing without a meaningful reference (in this case, they are my family’s scores on the windmill hole of the mini-golf course).

A well-designed executive information system (EIS) might help you solve this problem for about 25 percent of the cases. But there is a much more cost-effective solution: color. Now that most documents and reports are electronic and color printer are very affordable, the days of black-on-white reports should be over. Unfortunately, the truth is that nearly all reports produced today are still colorless.

Let’s jump into some real-world examples. One of my clients sells ready-mix concrete. Concrete is sold by the yard and delivered to your doorstep by cement trucks, so driver performance is a key competitive weapon for this company. It previously used fairly typical reports that listed driver hours, lateness, no shows, and so on. Putting this information together in a meaningful way was virtually impossible. As the client's new application was being implemented, essentially duplicated most of its current reports, but in the process we transformed those reports into very powerful tools using color.

The new system assigns color to specific truck driver comments: red for no show, pink for late, green for maintenance. When these colors are overlaid onto the standard reports the really important information (driver performance) jumps out very clearly. The consequence is that managers can immediately spot problem drivers and tackle the issues before they cost the company money or customers.

Does this really work? When you compare the company's June data to its July data the impact is obvious (see figures). June is spattered with red and pink boxes that in July are mostly blank except for a touch of pink. The difference is real and measurable, and it was not new data, but new presentation that made the difference.

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Problems jump from the page, thanks to color-coding in this June report on driver performance for a concrete company.  Red cells indicate driver no-shows; pink cells show when drivers were late; green cells show when trucks were down for maintenance.

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The same report a month later shows absenteeism has almost disappeared, and late starts have been cut substantially.  Color coding information draws managers' attention to key data, and enables them to act quickly to correct problems or exploit new opportunities.

A second client tracks production on injection molding machines. It is critical to maximize the efficiency of these expensive assets. The company's new production monitoring system compiles statistics at the end of each shift and posts the results to their Intranet.

Color coding efficiency

The reports are not raw numbers but color-coded efficiency data. Results by machine, job, shift, and cell are presented in green (110-90 percent), yellow (89-80 percent), and red (less than 80 percent) so machines that are running poorly are immediately obvious. System errors and missing data are flagged in blue and quickly addressed because the report forum is so public.

To make the system really powerful, my client uses a special efficiency methodology that shows both the overall performance and the factors contributing to the raw numbers. If overall production efficiency is 82 percent (yellow) you can quickly see that everything was running in the 90 percent (green) range except one factor (scrap generated at 73 percent, red). Supervisors and managers can review plant performance in seconds and immediately address the problems. Their old system did not generate any reports at all until weeks after the fact.

While colorful reports may have big impacts on screen, what happens when the toner meets the paper? A lot! Color printing is ubiquitous (if under-used) in today’s workplace. Shared color inkjet printers are now as common as laser printers and nearly as fast. I can’t imagine a home office without one. For the heavy hitters, color laser printers have reached commodity status. Truly cutting-edge companies may forgo the color printers and jump right to conference room computer projectors for presentations. (Imagine presenting a report to the CEO and fielding a question with, "Let’s drill down and find out…").

Before you draft up a memo demanding all reports use color, make certain that everyone agrees to what will be color-highlighted and what colors will be used. Even heated discussions over such simple issues as where to set the cut off between yellow and green (90 percent? 87 percent?). And how will you handle it if your lone-wolf engineer decides she likes 97.5 percent instead? The problems multiply when you want to highlight numbers based on a hidden calculation. You may be left wondering whether your CFO highlights gross revenue based on variance from budget or variance from net profit in the income report.

Adding color to your reports and memos is not going to replace the $3 million EIS your CIO has been begging for. But then again, it does not take much return value to give you a huge ROI on that $250 color inkjet printer.