All of us are smarter than any of us, and together we make better decisions. Smart corporate reporting strategies help groups of people focus on specific tasks. Rapidly advancing technology is reducing the time needed to produce reports and enabling information workers to effectively grapple with an ever-expanding universe of relevant metrics. Better tools are also capable of presenting information in engaging graphical formats that facilitate heightened levels of assimilation.

Dominion Enterprises [2], headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, reaches 34 million consumers every month with products that serve the real estate, specialty vehicle, employment, automotive, and travel markets, among others. It employs roughly 5,400 people nationwide and posted $427.5 million in revenue in its most recent reporting year. For several years, programmers at Dominion produced monthly reports on behalf of the HR department to quantify employee performance, benefits, and attendance data. These reports, spreadsheets for the most part, were updated at each payroll interval and posted as PDF files on the company's online HR portal. When one of Dominion's 585 managers needed more current information that fell between the scheduled reporting dates, the manager would call Dominion's HR department and order a special interim report. A manager or technician attached to the HR department would then run a query against data residing on Dominion's model 520 Power Server running Infinium payroll and benefits software and JD Edwards financials on IBM i. This process was disruptive and labor intensive for the technician and frustrating for the person requesting more up-to-date information. It also unnecessarily produced hundreds of individual reports. Hundreds of man-hours were wasted every month.

Last year, Dominion set out to improve its HR reporting process to provide realtime, on-demand information and reduce costs associated with the labor necessary to generate and maintain these reports. Current research indicates that a better-informed workforce feels more empowered, more productive, and more in control. Giving employees instant access to information on insurance, other benefits, and vacation days facilitates a sense of membership in a worthwhile community.

Dennis Ruud, senior systems analyst at Dominion, sifted through trade publications to look for a Business Intelligence (BI) package that could improve Dominion's current reporting process. He saw an ad for Clover Query from Business Computer Design [3].

Static Grids Are So Yesterday

Clover is BCD's web query and BI solution that serves unlimited users and produces realtime web reports and queries for deployment in browsers. Reports and graphs can be defined by using the Clover report templates and SQL wizards. These reports can incorporate totals, level breaks, and drill downs, and they can export to Excel, graphs, and executive dashboards. Clover can also create ad hoc and parameterized reports and offers full web-development capabilities, including dynamic library lists, record editing, change management, and session ID handling.

Ruud downloaded a fully functional demo copy of Clover from BCD's website and began tinkering with it. In about two hours he had already defined several reports and posted them to the Dominion HR portal. These reports presented information in colorful, dynamic graphs that improve readability. According to Ruud, "You can download Clover and start cranking out reports right away . . . before you even license it. When we looked at what it could produce, we were really impressed. The graphical tools worked quite well and produced exceptionally appealing charts and graphs. After two hours we said, 'Wow, this is pretty cool!' I guess you could say they had us hook, line, and sinker."

Ruud used Clover's templates and wizards to do much of the work. He simply selected the template he wanted, defined the fields, and told Clover where to find the files that contained the data it needed. As a seasoned developer with 20 years of RPG experience but only nominal exposure to web technologies, Ruud adds that Clover was easy to use and easy to integrate into Dominion's HR portal, built with IBM's WebSphere product. "I know next to nothing about HTML, but Clover generates the HTML in a flash. Clover also lets you go in and tweak the HTML if you need to do that, making it very flexible. It's also possible to call RPG programs from a Clover report," he says.

Smarter Charts, Smarter Decisions

Plugging data into drab rectilinear graphs is history. Clover includes templates that incorporate SmartCharts, a product that delivers an advanced set of key performance indicators, charts, graphs, and gauges that run as Flash objects. SmartCharts provides users with graphical views of realtime data and offers users drill-down capabilities so they can find exactly what they're looking for.

Ruud further enhanced the reports created by the templates to let users drill down on report data to obtain additional detail. "A really nice thing about this product is you can click on one of the bars in a bar graph, and it will drill down more deeply into the data. This is a feature that didn't exist in the other product we looked at. Configuring drill-downs is easy to do once you've done one."

A sick-hours report that Ruud built with Clover is shown in Figure 1 [4] and highlights another powerful feature. The report calls a backend RPG program that resequences the data and in turn creates a temp file before displaying it in the Clover-generated report. Because it also ends up working with a smaller subset of data, Ruud's cleverly designed report runs extremely quickly.

So far, Dominion is serving up about forty reports with Clover. "We're thinking all the time about all the different ways we can use Clover, and we're eager to convert hundreds of other reports that we have," says Ruud.

Users See Only What They're Authorized to See

Because Clover runs within the WebSphere Portal, users must log in with a user ID and password. Clover ties into Infinium's login screen so it knows the identity of a user, based on an authority table that already exists. Managers and other users are granted access to reports to which they are authorized, and no subsequent prompting is necessary.

As Dominion increases the number of reports accessible online and, correspondingly, the number of people served by these reports, the company won't need to license additional user seats, because BCD extends rights for unlimited usage in its standard license.

"If technology can make reporting less arduous, make reports more accurate, and facilitate instant access to key metrics for business decisions, why not deploy the tools that put those dynamics into play?" Ruud says.

Robert Gast lives in the Chicago area and manages Evant Group. His professional career has focused on the IBM midrange since 1986.

Vendor Contact Information

Business Computer Design Int'l, Inc. [5]
Hinsdale, Illinois
630-986-0800

Clover Query