Data Warehousing

[Jbartolucci]

I"m currently leading a project for implementation of a data warehouse in our call center operations. I wanted to see if anyone has implemented similar tools for information management and has any suggestions for products.

Our goal is to create a single reporting source for business users. We utilize many disparate data sources, including: Oracle, Avaya, IEX, and Witness systems. Ultimately, we want to introduce a web-based portal for end users to access professional-quality reporting.

We use Brio Intelligence suite as a data mining tool. We're evaluting addtional products from Brio such as; Brio Reports and Brio Portal. We're also looking at products from Crystal.

I would appreicate any input from others that have done similar projects. I'm particularly interested in feedback on products for data mining, report packages, and web-based portal programs.

Thanks for your assitance.

Joe

[rsutter]

Joe

My life is data mining. My company offers the use of Brio and Crystal reports, and Crystal wins by a landslide. The drag and drop ease of report writing has never been better. Also, Crystal Enterprise is a royalty free web interface that can be imbedded into your web applications on your intranet site to allow end users to view reports. CE9 also caches some data to let end users manipulate the style and limit the content of the reports on their end without a separate application.

Using Crystal reports, I can tap several D-bases at one time to produce reports as seemless as if the data were on one machine. Also, with CR9 I can export my charts and graphs directly to Excel, word, or Adobe. The export engine is fast and the addition of graphics (logos, etc.) does not seem to slow it down.

Also, it is important that whatever product you go with has full SQL manipulation in the report writing module so that you aren't stuck creating procedures just to get your aggregates. (MIN, MAX, COUNT). More to follow...

[Jbartolucci]

Rob:

Thanks very much for the feedback. I'm very excited about this project. We spend a considerable amount of personnel hours collecting and manipulating data to make it actionable. There is a significant opportunity for us by redploying resources on analysis rather than data collection.