Abstract

Introduction

Our client is the fastest growing VOIP telephone services provider to consumers over the Internet. They are successfully providing VOIP telephone services to 80,000+ consumers over the Internet for past few years.
To support business, client has built mission-critical OSS/BSS (Operations Support System/Business Support System) in-house. Key information related to customers, marketing, provisioning, billing, etc. is stored in loosely integrated databases. Our client needed enhanced real-time reporting to improve operations and ultimately customer experience.

Business Challenge

Like all other customer support, sales or marketing organizations, client needed an IT solution to help it monitor the customer satisfaction, sales results and the overall performance of the organization.
The operations team needed reports on operational data which included billing, customer provisioning, trouble tickets, network performance etc. Such reports can assist in enhanced resource planning and save significant cost. Due to time criticality of these reports, reports had to be delivered to the users.
The executive management needed consolidated reports that would statistically analyze data over period of time. Moreover, presenting real-time data on an Executive Dashboard would significantly enhance decision making.
The business reviews that are proven effective in identifying the health of the business were based on spreadsheets with data being collected from various data sources. This was a time consuming process. Also the information consistency was a problem because people were creating their own data aggregation.
Hence, there was need of a robust and scalable reporting platform that provided the following solution:

• A central reporting tool to enable consistency in reporting by aggregate and the integration of data from disparate customer, billing, and marketing sources
• Build and deliver key operational and executive reports
• Executive Dashboard that will automatically collect key information from different databases and provide an integrated view of key information to assist executives in decision-making.
• Automatically deliver the Dashboard report every week to all executives
• Ability to “drill-down” from overview information to detailed data
• Database to store key business information presented on the Executive Dashboard for historical reporting
• Database to store projections for key business information presented on the Executive Dashboard
• Ability to identify the source of all data
• Ease of use to reduce the time spent creating reports

Solution

The reporting platform for the operational and executive reports and Executive Dashboard is based on Crystal Reports XI and Report Application Server (RAS) provided by Business Objects Enterprise Solutions. The internal reporting application provided by RAS is created using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003.
The solution uses SQL Server 2000 and MySQL databases to extract data for the reports and Executive Dashboard.

Following is the approach used to build the solution:

Operational Reports
B1 – User requests report via browser
B2 – RAS checks for permissions
B3 – RAS fetches report from repository
B4 – RAS executes report against databases for real-time reporting
B5 – RAS delivers report to user via browser
Executive Dashboard
C1 – Executive logs on secured dashboard portal
Portal automatically makes multiple requests for report parts [graphs] to RAS.
C2 – RAS delivers requested report parts [graphs]
Portal displays these parts.
Report Development
A1 – Offshore developers develop/modify reports and add them to SR Reports Repository.

The reporting platform is based on 3 tier architecture with the databases representing the data layer, the business view representing the business layer and reports/dashboard representing the presentation layer.
Like the dashboard in a car, the Executive Dashboard is designed to provide a rich source of information at a glance to the users, with added ability to drill down from overview information into detailed data, and then navigate back to up to high-level information.
The operational reports and Executive Dashboard are scheduled on daily and weekly basis to the executives and the management to help them statistically analyzes data over period of time and hence easily monitors the overall performance of the organization.


Conclusion

Executive Dashboard and reports have yielded a number of benefits to the client, including better visibility into the business, better decision making, better customer understanding, data consistency and ease of use.
The Executive Dashboard helps check the health of the business with just a glance, while the deep drill-down capabilities allow getting more information whenever needed.