CFS Europe provide customer feedback systems at point-of-sale for large retail organisations throughout the UK and Europe, including banks and major high street stores. Having implemented a solution to collect the data at point-of-sale and transfer it back to head office, CFS needed an automated and streamlined system to generate the multitude of reports requested by their clients and to deliver them on a monthly, weekly and daily basis, which is when they approached Softwire.
Softwire worked closely with CFS to understand their requirements and produce a specification that defined the required functionality. We then developed and tested the reporting software, deployed this on CFS’s own servers and continue to support the solution on an ongoing basis.
The reporting system is built on a Microsoft technology platform and comprises a web-based administration interface through which the reporting schedule is configured, synchronisation jobs to transfer daily data updates into a central OLAP data cube and reporting components to generate the required reports from the OLAP cube at the scheduled times.
Report scheduling is handled intelligently with a single reporting task able to result in the generation of numerous department-level reports (potentially in the hundreds) with each delivered by email to the appropriate contact within that department. This approach minimises the amount of manual configuration required by CFS and significantly reduces the possibility of data entry errors.
Technologies employed include ASP.NET for the web interface, a C#.NET Windows service for the report scheduler, SQL Server Analysis Services for the OLAP cube and SQL Server Reporting Services for report generation. All components were delivered to budget and have allowed CFS to manage an extremely large reporting operation with just a small support staff.
