Reporting – 3rd party/Supplier usage analysis

Third party/Supplier usage analysis found in the menu list under Reporting in the main header bar, provides a review of the Third party/ILL/Doc del functions that have been used during the selected period. 
You can use this report to find out which third parties (Organisations) or ILL/Doc del Suppliers you are using most often, questions for which more than one third party was used, the order in which multiple third parties are being used, etc. 
You can also see trends in Supplier usage and review the items that are being obtained through your suppliers.

The system will remember the parameters you used for this report last time, and will present those results on initial display next time you use this report.  This makes rerunning reports for different time periods very easy. 

To use this report:

  • Options to show the records for “This month”, “Last month”, “Today” and “Yesterday” are provided, along with the Selected date option that allows any date range to be selected.
  • Service type selection options at the top of the screen allow this report to show just the time spent on Customer service, Internal tasks, or KB entries, or any combination of these.
    • Choose whether you want to report on just the ILL/Doc del Suppliers, your Third party Organisations, or both (Any).  You can use the Export function to take the results of your report out to Excel for further analysis, and importantly, in Excel, the Supplier report includes details of the bibliographic items that are being requested from the Suppliers.
    • The report shows the Organisation/Supplier name, and its contact details.  If you have used the “Other organisation” option to record details of a Supplier/Third party who is not in your Organisation code table, their name will appear in the Organisation column and the Address/Access information column will be blank (to highlight that an “Other organisation” has been used).
  • The Question/Request text column displays the same sort of question summary used in the Open questions screen, that includes client contact details. The Question column also contains the same sort of Client contact detail summary information as is provided in the Open questions screens.
  • Choose your sort order – “Organisations” for an analysis of the Third party organisations that you are using, “Question number” for an analysis by Question number, or “Location” for an analysis of the staff members who are using the Third party functions. 
  • Each column can be unsorted, sorted ascending, or sorted descending. Click the column heading to cycle through these options. If a column is contributing to the sort sequence it will be highlighted in a grey colour. If more than one column has been defined for the sort order, the sort precedence of columns is left to right.
  • The number of records shown in a page can be controlled using the Page navigation controls at the bottom of the screen.  

The [Export] options present the question and answer information in the same Export (Excel spreadsheet) format used for RefTracker Data exports.
Text and client contact information are included in all reports. Bibliographic information is ONLY included for Supplier reports, as for that report, it is useful for analysis of what materials are being requested of these suppliers.