Case Study of a Special Custom Development Project *Cool Customer

Partnering with an IT Organization to Meet Sophisticated Bulk Printing Requirements with Crystal Enterprise

Tools Used:

Custom Development using Crystal Enterprise SDK

Background:

The senior manager of the IT organization in a leading global financial services organization - headquartered in Canada - had the unenviable task of ensuring that a large number of complex reports were accurately assembled and sent to specific, yet geographically dispersed print centres, every month so that they could then be delivered to a number of demanding individual and corporate customers. The reports were, of course, critical because they highlighted the wealth management and protection of these customers. The IT manager knew he had to automate the process, but the challenges were huge.

Business Issues:

• Automate the production, printing, and distribution of monthly reports 

To meet the management and operational demands of the business, the IT organization concluded that their existing system for handling monthly reports - schedule batches, run, collate, and then print or notify people that the reports are ready - was simply too time consuming and prone to error. Of course, it was even more complicated because multiple systems were getting the data ready before the reports could start to be scheduled. It did not help that each system got its data ready at different times.

The manual effort required just for the start of the process - even before the reports were collated and distributed - was astonishing. People manually scheduled reports, manually determined which data was ready and from what system, manually followed through on system errors, and manually rescheduled reports when needed.

The criticality of getting the reports to the right people, in the right places, and at the right times, cannot be overstated. So, working through the night almost became institutionalized at month ends.

The IT organization knew that reporting demands would only grow with time and the burden on its resources would only worsen. It was imperative to find a solution that automated much of the process and eliminated or minimized the manual interventions needed at the time.

Solution:

• A custom solution using the Crystal Enterprise SDK

The Corporation chose APOS Systems Inc. as their technology partner to help them implement a solution that would automate the process for producing, printing and distributing the monthly reports in a cost-effective manner. This meant using their existing enterprise and reporting infrastructure - Crystal Enterprise and Crystal Reports v8.5. 

The corporation has multiple systems that produce data and they used Crystal to produce reports on a monthly basis. At the monthly report time, each system completes processing data and gets ready - but at different times. As each system gets ready, they need to schedule all of its reports, run the reports, collate the reports for the correct groups, and then either print the reports at specific print centres, or notify specific people that their particular reports are ready for viewing online. If the system sends reports to a print centre, it must then also notify a person that reports must be collected and distributed. Clearly, complexity abounds. 

Essentially, the solution has four phases:

• Scheduling Batches

• Collecting Scheduled Batches (Collating)

• Distribution (Post Processing)

• Printing and/or E-Mail Report Link

Each phase is carefully monitored, so that the system can notify system administrators about any problems that occur, let these administrators intervene as necessary and perform the necessary error recovery procedures. 

The roles were clearly understood. 

The Corporate IT Organization handled the data at their end to programmatically build the schedules and build the print batches. This included a program that examined the various systems and creating a batch of schedules to be run in a database when a particular system was in its ready state - that is, when the system finished processing all of the data for its reports. In other words, they created batch-enabled queues to run.

APOS Systems played a pivotal role in this solution by writing the server programs that did the scheduling and printing, together with the administrative programs that monitored the schedule and printing functionalities, overcoming many challenges especially related to printing. Key technical accomplishments included:

• The APOS software monitored the queues and, as soon as batches became available to run, it went through these batches and scheduled the reports to be run, and monitored the process.

• The reports get printed at print centres that are used for other jobs. Each customer gets a set of reports. In order to simply the collating process, the reports needed to be printed together. APOS used a special driver that allowed the solution to concatenate different - and varying - reports into one file. That file was then sent to a customer-specific queue for further control and identification.

• The print requirements included double-sided printing and stapling. APOS needed to make sure that an odd-numbered page always started on the right side and that each report was stapled in the correct position. This meant that APOS had to make sure blank pages were inserted appropriately and that staple-commands appeared in print files that controlled the proper staple orientation. APOS solved the problem by manipulating the output file using the printer driver language to be sure that the reports within a set started on a new page, and that the staples appeared in the correct corner of the page.

• Crystal Enterprise 8.5 and Crystal Reports 8.5 did not support the print-to-file functionality. APOS solved this problem by writing that portion using Crystal Reports 9.0 and integrating it in a custom way to ensure functional integrity.

Results:

First, printing is now easy and reliable. All print jobs come out in the right order, are packaged in the right order, with clearly identified header pages. The print queues are tightly controlled. All the operators need to do is take the reports from the printer and ship them to the right destination.

In addition, the print queues are in their geographically correct print destinations. The entire process is solidly automated. System administrators are readily notified of problems and can take remedial actions quickly. Indeed, the user interface allows people to reprint reports, for example, directly from the print files, eliminating wait times. Paper consumption is cut in half, because of double sided printing. Report distribution times are speeded up, because the scheduling of batches and associated processing is automatically done as soon as the batches are schedules to run.

If you'd like additional information about APOS custom development services, please contact Allan Pym at apym@apos.on.ca or 519-666-2020.

Toronto Crystal/Business Objects Users Group *Meet and Share with Other Users

APOS is pleased to sponsor the Toronto Crystal/Business Objects Users Group. Now with separate sessions in the same meeting for both Crystal and Business Objects users, this users group allows you to learn from other users and share experiences. We'd love to see you at the next meeting, early in 2005.

On-Line Solutions Presentations *Web Demos

Find out more about the Enterprise Reporting and Business Intelligence solutions from Business Objects by attending one of the online presentation times shown below, or contact us to arrange a presentation specifically for you and your company associates . . .

Tuesday

Jan 25, 2005

1:00 PM EST

Tuesday

Feb 22, 2005

3:00 PM EST

Tuesday

Mar 22, 2005

1:00 PM EST