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Case Studies
Reporting Portal Provides Improved Visibility into Operating Performance
Project at a Glance |
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RDA developed a reporting portal for Southern Company which provides timely reporting and greater communication among the executive team and also fosters accountability among managers of the group. |
About Our Client
Southern Company is a leading U.S. producer of electricity, as well as fiber optics and wireless communications capabilities. With 4.3 million customers and more than 41,000 megawatts of generating capacity, Atlanta-based Southern Company is the premier energy company serving the Southeast.
Background
Southern Company's IT Operations Group is responsible for hundreds of computerized business applications as well as various organizational IT-related functions. The management of these Business Applications and functions falls to the Application Services (AS) group.
It has historically been difficult for managers within AS to acquire specific, detailed information about the performance of the various functions within AS. As a response, AS Management identified a set of key metrics to help them understand the current state of several performance metrics.
RDA was charged with detailed analysis to identify source systems and reporting use cases, warehouse design and construction, portal and dashboard design, and implementation of all components. RDA managed the project throughout the SDLC phases and regularly interfaced with Southern Company managers, stakeholders, and SMEs to ensure that requirements and implementation matched.
Solution Detail
The resulting BI platform made use of the industry standard Kimball dimensional modeling approach. Approximately seven data sources (human resources, system performance monitoring metrics, time card entry, etc.) ranging from legacy systems to Web-based data entry applications were processed into a set of conformed dimensions and facts.
Over 25 dashboards (cost center data, budgeting, expenditures, system attributes, personnel attributes, etc.) with rich charting visualization were created to present the benchmark information residing within the data warehouse and cubes. The dashboards are laid out to be viewed online or printed as a multiple page report. Online viewing is enhanced with magnified views of each report. Six of the reports were created with multiple level drill down capability.
The technical implementation relied upon the following components:- SQL Server 2005 for hosting the data warehouse
- Data extraction orchestration from data sources via SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
- SSIS processing components used for transformation and loading processing
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) for business reporting
- SharePoint for reporting portal providing a unified BI one-stop shop to the business
- Dundas charting components (hosted within SSRS) for advanced dashboard data visualization
- ASP.NET custom application to set targets and enter data not currently available from data sources
Challenges
Visual presentation was paramount for our customer, and the capability of SQL Server Reporting Services and the Dundas reporting tools produced a very professional reporting product that set this solution well above many typical reporting tools. Significant effort was put into the visual design of the reports, which conveyed a higher standard of excellence than many of their past engagements. This generated internal excitement about the reporting platform as well as internal demand for similar solutions.
The technical fit of the solution was key to Southern Company choosing this platform. They had already deployed SQL Server in the enterprise but this was truly the first large-scale reporting engagement and they have used the solution as the de-facto standard for all future reporting engagements.
Benefits
The implementation of this reporting portal allowed Southern Company to build on the momentum generated by the pilot version of the AS Metrics report which was done in Microsoft Excel and distributed manually:- Provides improved visibility into the operating performance of the Application Services Group. Upon deployment, customer immediately identified areas for operational improvement that were not visible in prior versions of the report due to a lack of a comprehensive view of all of the data sources.
- Provides timely reporting. The previous manual monthly reporting created in Excel took two weeks to gather data and generate. Now the dashboard reporting is immediately available.
- Provides greater communication among members of Application Services Executive Management, allowing them to collectively review the performance of the group using these reports.
- Fosters accountability among Application Services Managers. Key performance metrics of a manager's performance will now be available for the entire management team to review.
- Complements team goals. The Application Services Management Team will be able to collectively set goals.
- Improves morale of AS personnel by identifying metrics that measure Southern Company as a "Great place to work."
- Improves customer service by enabling reporting of Customer Satisfaction Surveys.
- Provides greater opportunity to increase overall application uptime by monitoring which applications fail more often than others.
Technically Speaking
RDA's solution complements the architectural standards currently in place at Southern Company and will also be a reusable platform for future reporting needs. The solution is based on leveraging SQL Server 2005 for reporting as well as extraction, translation and loading (ETL) of data from the source systems needed to produce the reports.
The solution leverages SQL Server 2005 SSIS packages to perform the extraction, translation and loading (ETL) of the data sources into a data mart for reporting. The SSIS packages are scheduled to run automatically at off-peak hours to ensure data is kept up-to-date without negatively impacting the performance of production databases. For goals, thresholds, and other manually supplied data, the solution leverages an ASP.NET user interface to update the reporting data mart. The report's elements (or "dashboards") were developed using SQL Server Reporting Services and Dundas for Reporting Services controls. The reports are hosted in SharePoint Web Parts.
