Our customer (a consultancy) collects data from a wide variety of sources (which are not all surveys) and provides service to their clients by providing a single consolidated view of industry KPIs tailored for each client (for instance it compares the performance of that client against the industry, the region, similar sized companies etc.). These reports were to be delivered individually and offline but they needed to be refreshed weekly.

The challenges they faced were numerous, the data volumes were very large by all standards (millions of records updated each day) and the reports included fiscal data along with other information which was very diverse both in terms of its source and its nature. The value in their service was that the results were very current, with data being a maximum of 24 hours old at that time it was reported. This challenge was amplified by the fact that there were 1000’s of individual reports each containing their own view of the data. It was a operations challenge to manage the definitions of what each report should and should not contain let alone generate the reports in time.

We helped the customer achieve their objectives in 3 ways:

• rollout of new systems for processing and managing all of the data
• creation of a system for managing the content and the distribution of the reports
• creation of a custom system which could produce the reports themselves very quickly

Aspects of this system and the expertise we gained from getting past these challenges have contributed heavily to the development of our Research Vault technology as well the Report Generator system which we have deployed for many customers