BI Case Study: Doing More With LessBI Case Study: Doing More With Less

When CBF decided to use Crystal, several pain-points arose, inherent in the demands placed on the organization by its project-by-project business model. First and foremost, data transfer was an issue. Reports needed to go out to upper-level departmental directors as well as to the managers of individual projects. Managers needed only budget data for their specific projects, while directors needed access to just about everything. Furthermore, because managers oversee up to 12 different projects, they needed to see an overall budget as well as those 12 specific ones.

The question then became how to splinter all that data up and deliver it accurately and efficiently to a group of disparate users. CBF worked with a consultant from IBM, who soon discovered that there were limits to what the CBF system could handle. All the projects being juggled by the foundation resulted in a large number of parameter fields --each one corresponding to a single project's budget. Early on in the testing process, CBF's servers would slow down whenever too much data was forced into those fields, which contained room for 225 characters. Even when the system would accept the data for reports containing a large number of budgets, it would take twenty minutes to process it and create the report -- a delay that would certainly test the patience of a project manager trying to see if her budget for bacteria analysis was on pace.

The solution was a kind of jury-rig. The consultant devised an ASP program, a user-friendly page that contained all the metrics that employees might wish to have in their reports. This forced CBF's managers and directors to pick and choose, to be selective. It also allowed Ally Gontang, the foundation's report-writing director, to determine which reports any given user required, limiting the number of people trying to access a report, and thus freeing up valuable bytes. The consultant also recommended pulling data in bunches -- if someone's report required 60 project budgets, create thirty, and then create the next thirty.

Limited hardware also posed problems. At the time of the Crystal implementation, CBF had only two SQL Servers, which were running both transactional and analytical programs simultaneously. Whenever data-transfers occurred between Epicor and Crystal, the whole system would hang. But two months ago, the IT department got its hands on a used server, which it now dedicates solely to Crystal and the generation of reports.

Still, the overall results haven't been quite good enough, says Gontang. "I don't think it's fulfilled all our needs yet." She says that certain departmental managers need to view a vast number of budgets -- not only by project, but also operational and supplemental budgets -- in order to get a wide-angle view of the business, and they aren't yet getting the reports they want. Gontang and IT, therefore, need to figure out a way to deliver them, in a single dashboard, without slowing down the system. "I think we've come up with a new report," she says, which has mainly involved putting other "filters" in place, and forcing department heads to be selective with what metrics they need to see. "It's the only thing we haven't deployed yet," Gontang says, "but we should have that capability soon."