Cutting costs and going green with Business Intelligence
By Sanjeev Datta, Senior Consultant for PerformanceG2
I always find interest in situations where, as a full-service CPM organization specializing in BI, we make an instant difference to our clients by significantly improving their profitability and performance, while at the same time, helping them cut costs and go green.
A few weeks ago, one of our clients approached us with a situation where invoice reports that went our to their customers who bought products via a Web site, were eating up their budgeted office supplies allocations more than they had expected. In a way, this was good news as sales figures were up, however the sales numbers would look more attractive if internal costs were down too.
One solution that we proposed to our client to meet this challenge was to create invoice reports in IBM Cognos Report Studio and distribute them via an automated nightly email process rather than a daily chore of printing out invoices and analyzing and calculating shipments, which can be time consuming and cumbersome tasks, especially for invoices going to global clientele.
PerformanceG2 took upon the challenge of creating this highly customized and extremely detailed invoice report in Report Studio version 8.4. With the use of singletons, which are data items that can be placed anywhere on the pixel perfect Web based reporting tool, and with the use of blocks, tables and various conditional statements to customize the report to include business rules for specialized groups of customers (e.g., domestic versus international, currency conversions, changing address lines, etc.), we delivered to our client The Invoice Report.
Report delivery was decided to go out in PDF format as an email attachment. For this, we used a feature in Report Studio known as “bursting”. The burst feature is used to run a report and divide the output based on a burst key, in this case, unique invoice numbers, which then generate multiple outputs inclusive of security features for each of these invoices. Therefore, this one developed report was to generate thousands of invoices per month and email them out to their respective customers daily, eliminating human errors and postal delivery delays all while significantly reducing printing costs, paper and my favorite: terminating the extremely time consuming task of folding these paper invoices and carefully placing them into envelopes. In addition, in the event a scheduled job halts, or is not completed in the specified time, an alert is sent out to the concerned owners who can take appropriate actions to rectify any inconsistencies before they reach the far end.
In the end, the challenge was met, the project was a success, and the project is now in production to our client’s and their customers’ satisfaction. With the use of Cognos Event Studio, and some creative green thinking, we have handed ownership of this project to our client.
July 9th, 2010 at 1:23 am
Good article Sanjeev…Couple of comments on the cost savings front & security
1. How did the costs for acquiring additional BI licenses stack up against paper print outs n other office supplies?
2. Were you able to encrypt the financial information before emails were sent to customers globally? How did you address potential security risks transmitting financial information electronically?
Shwetal M
July 28th, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Thanks for reading and commenting!
1. Costs related to BI licenses generally average anywhere between $800-$2500, depending on what product you go with. Report Studio costs under $1000 per user. In this particular case, we developed the Invoice reports using an existing developer license so there were no added on costs other than the time spent developing the report. I worked at a company in the healthcare business that would spend approx $650,000 annually on printing supplies! This project did surely save our client costs associated with printing, buying stamps and having a resource spend 4 hours a day on folding envelops.
2. Reports were emailed using an exchange server which was equipped with anti-virus software and encrypting messages to end users. Users have the ability to either select an email feature, or for a more secure environment, logging into the portal to view a history of their receipts. Much like how one would check their bank statements online these days.