APOS Tools Used:

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) with Crystal Enterprise v.9

Background:

With over 1100 employees worldwide, 8000 customers in 144 countries, Software Spectrum is the largest software reseller in the world. Crystal Enterprise is a cornerstone of the technology that gives Software Spectrum its competitive advantage. Over 30 Crystal Report designers and more than 3000 instances run every month attest to a busy, commercial environment. Reports are split almost evenly between Customers, Inside Sales, and External Sales. Reports lubricate the business.

Business Issues:

• Customers were not receiving critical reports because the system did not generate the appropriate failure instances notifying staff about failed report deployments

All IT organizations are aware of the importance of knowing when an instance fails. But what happens when the program that creates the report failure itself fails? Customers do not get the reports they expected, and the IT organization will find itself scrambling to resolve the failure. This is exactly what happened at Software Spectrum. In fact, it took two days and many people to discover what the problem was. From a business perspective, the incident was absolutely unacceptable. “We run a very effective reports infrastructure, our customers both expect and rely on outstanding services, and so we could not let this happen again,” said Del Ross. It’s all about customer satisfaction, and seamless business operations.

Solution:

• Use the APOS KPI add-in software tool

Software Spectrum needed a fairly simple and easy way to decipher the data object in which Crystal Enterprise stores information about its failed instances. Without the ability to pull the information out of the data object, Software Spectrum would be faced with the challenge of spending days finding the failure, getting the reissue resolved, and getting their “failures report” working again. “Our IT team has the expertise to enhance Crystal’s technology but, in this case, we found that the KPI tool was the simplest and most cost-effective way to resolve the issue. Now we know our failures before our customers do,” said Mr. Ross. “This is of enormous benefit to the IT support group and to the business,” he added.

Results:

• Allows IT staff to respond to failure reports quickly

• Saves one hour in administrative time every day

The Spectrum Software IT staff now generate daily reports showing how many instances are run, how many failures occurred, what the failures were, and who should respond to the failures-that is, which recipients should get the failure reports. The results are two-fold. First, report deployment issues are quickly resolved, enhancing customer satisfaction. The second is that IT staff save an hour a day because they don’t have to spend as much time as before investigating report failures. “Our justification for KPI is amply rewarded,” said Del Ross.

To read the full Software Spectrum Case Study or view others, visit here.

Business Objects Annual User Conference *User Event of the Year

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

Nov 9, 2004

1:00 PM EST