I’ve spent nearly a decade helping people get more out of their BI tool (as well as being a user of various tools myself), and there’s one data consumption mode we all just can’t seem to shake - good ole’ emailed PDFs.
No matter how interactive or engaging a live dashboard is on the web, the truth is most people start and end their day checking their email (for better or worse, often from their phones!). I get it; I do it too. And today, I’m excited to announce the ability to schedule Omni dashboard PDFs directly to email 🎉
As data people, half our job is in the weeds getting the data - performing data prep and analysis, then building a consumable dashboard that distills those hard-earned insights for stakeholders. The other half is actually getting them to consume it, and then do something actionable with it. The second half can often be the trickiest. One of the easiest ways to get information in front of folks is to put it right in their existing workflows - be it their email, Slack, or embedded in another product they use, like Notion or Salesforce. And today, scheduling dashboard PDFs directly to email is our first step on the journey to deliver data anywhere you need it.
Delivering data directly to email with Omni
Before releasing, we worked with several teams to help us iron out the details. One of those teams, Smart Access - a frontline performance management platform, helped us test scheduled emails as a way to send data to internal and external users:
“We’ve been partnering with Omni to deliver data to team members across Smart Access as well as to clients who have employees on the warehouse floor - helping us save time and deliver a great customer experience. Throughout the process, the Omni team has worked closely with us to incorporate feedback and learn about our future goals and ideal workflows for delivering data externally.” - John White, Founder at Smart Access
Selfishly, we built this for us too. Using scheduled dashboards amongst our team has already helped us integrate more data into our operational workflows. Here are a couple of the ways we’re already using it internally:
Every Monday morning, our product and engineering teams receive a scheduled email with a dashboard of the most recent feature requests and bugs. This serves as our reminder to assign priorities. And when we inevitably have questions about those requests, it’s easy to just click the link in our email → open the live dashboard → and drill into the data further.
Additionally, each morning, we receive scheduled emails about the previous day’s customer usage activity. This helps our execs and customer teams keep a pulse on our customer experience and identify who we may need to proactively reach out to and offer support.
Even though most of us at Omni love nothing more than diving into live data, we still get busy with our line of business roles. Getting these dashboard emails is a quick and frictionless way to insert more data into our processes and do our jobs more efficiently.
This is just the first step in this journey, so look for many more integrations and data consumption modes to come!
And if you’re curious to test what we’ve built for yourself, we’d love to have you explore Omni 🚀