Generating periodic reports on the evolution of income and expenses

The usual management IT tools are not flexible enough to cover all the needs of companies. One of the common shortcomings are the very specialized reports used by directors that allow them to see the progress of a business in order to make strategic decisions about it.

Client: a real estate company

Need: generate a series of monthly reports to track the evolution of the rental business of various owners.

Previous Situation: These reports were generated by hand for a few owners in Excel sheets and saved for later consultation and presentation of the annual summaries. It was a very slow, inflexible, error-prone and difficult to maintain process.

Project drivers: Much of the required data was scattered throughout the organization in Excel sheets and no changes were wanted to the company's applications or databases. Therefore, the solution should store the data needed to generate the reports (Data Mart) and include a system for introducing and reviewing them, be flexible so that employees themselves could modify the reports and, above all, very economical to develop and maintain.

Data structure: for the most part, the data was organized by properties and months and they wanted to get the aggregated values of portals, buildings, owners and types of owners by years and accumulated in the year for each of the months. This type of reports is what best handles multidimensional databases or OLAP cubes.

Solution chosen: from the different options that existed in the market was chosen PALO from Jedox for having incorporated its own database with no maintenance and perfectly integrated with the engine for generating reports and for having a connector with Excel that allows users themselves to generate simple reports and easily modify those custom designed, allowing a very low maintenance cost. Any user with average knowledge of Excel can understand the structure of the reports and modify them. An additional advantage is that the cost per license is zero so that regardless of the number of users using the product its cost will be zero.

Implementation: a copy of the company's Oracle database was made and queries were generated to retrieve the necessary data. Next, the multidimensional DB was designed. Then, the screens of the data that had to be entered by hand and finally the reports that were requested.

Cost of the project: 200 working days + 0 euros per license.