Information Builders, a leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) and real-time Web reporting, today announced that the City of Montreal in Quebec, Canada has launched an online environment for maintaining municipal finances and managing receipts. The city used Information Builders' WebFOCUS software to create the financial reporting portal and the iWay Enterprise Integration Suite to access data from its mainframe-based tax system. "Our users are saving time, minimizing development costs, and leveraging financial data more than ever before," said Herve Caparros, a programmer/analyst in the city's finance department.
For many years, the City of Montreal has depended on a central tax system called OASIS, hosted on a mainframe computer. Following the merger of 27 suburban municipalities into one government entity last year, this system doubled in size from 200,000 to 400,000 accounts, representing about $2.5 billion (Can.) in receipts.
"The city had a great influx of new employees who needed self-service access to our data warehouse," reported Samuel Kairy, head of IT for the city's finance department. "Expanding OASIS and supporting new users was placing intense resource demands on our IT staff."
Government institutions often rely on diverse information systems to conduct planning, service delivery, and internal evaluation and administration. These systems have evolved independently over decades, making them difficult to integrate with modern Internet technologies. "Information Builders brings its mature data access and reporting software to bear on the problem," said Gerald Cohen, president of Information Builders. "WebFOCUS includes analytic tools for creating reports, graphs, and bar charts, as well as features such as matrix reporting, ranking, color-coding, drill-downs, and font customization. It works in conjunction with data integration technology from iWay Software to stage data to and from just about any type of data source."
Kairy and his team, comprised of Caparros and two other programmers, developed the new WebFOCUS self-service application in less than two months, including a unique Web portal page giving access to all the reports through dynamic HTML menus and more. They installed WebFOCUS software on a Microsoft Windows NT server and built an Oracle data warehouse on a UNIX server. iWay Enterprise Integration Suite works behind the scenes to transfer financial data from the OASIS environment to the Oracle data warehouse. "The iWay Enterprise Integration Suite works as the middleware layer, transferring financial data from the Oracle data warehouse to the users in PDF or in Excel format files," explained Caparros.
Now that this advanced business intelligence infrastructure is in place, authorized city employees can easily execute both predefined and custom reports on demand. About 300 city employees have access to the self-service application. On average, the site gets between 50 and 100 visits every day.
Some users prefer alert-based reporting, meaning they only want to see a report when something changes. Others want to receive periodic summaries, yet have the ability to drill down into the data when something piques their interest. Still other users need action statements that allow them to set other activities in motion. WebFOCUS accommodates all of these users, allowing them to access financial information using familiar tools such as Web browsers, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF files.
More than 500 reports, predefined or constructed by the users, are accessible through the portal. Authorized users have access to dynamic menus and can therefore very easily share new reports among themselves. Users can schedule reports for automatic distribution via printers, faxes, e-mail messages, and wireless devices. They can also specify events that will automatically trigger reports when specific conditions are met -- for example, when a certain budget is exceeded.
"End users now have a great tool to obtain and share the specific information that they need," said Caparros. "The beauty of the system is its simplicity: Users simply need a standard Web browser to access this useful self-service reporting application."
Quelle: Yahoo Finance
