BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE & REPORTING FROM SVA CONSULTING

A school district consisting of 12 different schools and 750+ teachers found themselves struggling to make sense of data from many different systems. Teachers were spending hours assembling data. Administrators spent time comparing assessment and achievement scores across different assessment tools, schools, grades, classrooms, and teachers.

Our professionals solved the problem by working with the client to build a data warehouse, conforming and normalizing the data. Through data assessment and profiling, we worked with the client to develop a standard, multi-tier scoring system. The student, teacher, and classroom data was conformed across the district. As a result, teachers and administrators have a centralized source to access this information delivered through Microsoft SharePoint®. Information is delivered to teachers in a static, highly formatted manner; it’s delivered to administrators using a flexible tool that lends itself well to analytics.

A large insurance company was struggling with aggregating hundreds of thousands of rows of transactional data per month into meaningful data for statutory reporting and financial analysis. In addition, they needed to create journal entries to account for these transactions from their operational system. Not all the information required in the financial and reporting logic was available in any source system.

We solved the problem by creating a system to apply the required business logic to generate both the journal entries and reporting necessary to support their business. Where an existing data source did not exist, web-based configuration screens were developed and made available to the users. This put Finance in control of their own system, rather than relying on an IT resource to change configurations in the database. Working within their technology footprint, the data is sourced and housed in an Oracle database and transformed using SQL Server Integration Services. Information is delivered via Business Objects and Crystal Reports. We took the efficiency a step further and developed an import to bring the journal entries into their ERP system.

A higher education institution with over 100 departments needed a better way to manage costs and expenditures. Each department chair needed to be able to see the actual revenue and expenses attributed to their department as well as the future commitments made and how those expenditures compared to budget. Dynamic security and the ability for users to answer their own questions by drilling into the detail were key drivers in the project.

Our professionals were able to address these issues by designing a data mart capturing key information from their ERP system as well as making information usable and actionable. Using SQL Server Integration Services to transform the data and SQL Server Analysis Services to manage the dynamic security, each person can see the data for their departments and nothing else. The information was delivered through drillable reports developed in SQL Server Reporting Services, further leveraging the investment they already made in SQL Server.

A non-profit provider of social and medical services needed a way to better manage their financial and client service goals at an agency level while providing needed detail to people in the field. Data was sourced in multiple homegrown and commercial systems. Because of the multiple systems, the data did not always have a consistent structure or use.

We worked with this client to build an enterprise reporting system by first assessing their organizational reporting needs. Rather than taking a data-centric approach, we assessed their business questions, then designed a system to feed those informational needs. Sourcing data from multiple systems, as well as conforming it into standard metrics, allowed us to provide apples-to-apples performance management across programs and services. The data is accessible to executive and field personnel through dashboards and reports deployed through Microsoft SharePoint®.