Illustrations

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 The company’s need is to more easily analyze sales, for example annual, quarterly and monthly trends of volume and frequency by customer type, customer, product group and product.

The Sales system generates some reports but they are fixed format and the flexibility to view the information from different perspectives is limited. Trend reports are currently not available.

Data for this come from three different files:

• A data extract from the Sales system containing a record for each sales transaction going back several years and includes the Sale date, Customer ID, Product Code, and several measures including Unit List Price, Discount percentage, Unit Sale Price, Quantity, and Total Sale amount.
• A Customer information file that that contains information for each customer, including customer name, address, type (Direct, Retailer, Wholesaler), and standard discount percentage.
• A Product information file that contains information for each product, including the product description and the product group it belongs to. 

The Solution is of low complexity and would likely require less than a day of development effort. 

The company’s need is to improve the reporting, analysis and understanding of operating expenses, in terms of current year actual spending versus plan and last year actuals.

Data for this comes from four different sources via data extracts:

• Planning system, where Planning is performed at the Account Name and Function level.
• General Ledger system, where data is at the Account Code, Department Code and Journal Entry Line/Supplier Name level.
• Employee Expenses system, where data is at the Employee, Account Code, and Department Code level.
• Workbook where the Organization and Account structures/hierarchies are maintained.

The Solution is of low to medium complexity and would likely require 3 to 5 days of development effort.

The company’s need is to better understand staff changes and movements from one month to the next or later month, for each Department, Function, or Organization. This needs to include counts as well as employee level identification of new hires, leaves, changes in status, role, grade level, salary, manager/leader, and department.

Data for this is from the Human Resources system, with one data extract at the end of each month that identifies each employee’s state at that time, i.e. their status, role, grade level, manager/leader, and department.

The Solution is of medium to high complexity and would likely require 6 to 10 days of development effort. While there is only one source of data, the transformations required in order to generate the movement/change information as well as the reporting metrics, can be quite complex.