Project Type:  Universe Design, Architecture Review and Enterprise Reporting

Duration:  6 Months 

Challenge

• Enable the sales department to compare profit & loss over time - between different years, different months and different weeks.
• Reduce the time and manual effort spent by the human resources department in collecting and manipulating employee expense data.
• Complete an architecture review of the broadcast server to enable business users or IT staff to publish, push, and broadcast reports to the corporation.

WIT’s Solution

WIT helped Universal Forest Products Inc. accomplish the above objectives by troubleshooting the Broadcast Agent and creating reports for the sales and human resources departments.  The project utilized the following tools:

1.   SQL Server

2.   Progress Database

3.   Business Objects Suite for reporting and analysis.

WIT’s consultants found the issues related to UFPI's Broadcast Agent, made the necessary corrections, and documented the issues with a straightforward solution.

Worked with UFPI's IT department to design a Progress database to capture the organization’s profit & loss data and designed and created the necessary reports required to analyze the information over a period of time.

Designed an application working with UFPI's IT Department to gather expense data from various flat files into SQL Server for report creation and generation.  Security was implemented, which did not previously exist, based on employee designation.

Result

• Enhanced planning for the sales team who can now analyze profit & loss data over a period of time.

• The human resources department can now prepare reports for employee expenses for any branch/division in a matter of seconds.  Previously, this task would take 15-20 man days of effort.  Confidential data is now secure.

• UFPI is able to publish, push, and broadcast reports to the corporation via the Broadcast Agent.