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Development
Costs Reduced by over 50% ...
Client Profile:
Problem Statement:
This client, a fast-growing, high-volume restaurant chain (publicly
traded), needed a way to provide key metrics to its managers so that they could
effectively manage rapid growth. The client wanted to
give managers at all levels access to live business data with which
they could make daily or weekly adjustments to sales forecasts, food purchases,
staffing levels, and other business variables. Managers needed to respond to
local market needs more promptly, and everyone in the company wanted
to operate from a single, standardized set of business data.
The Technical Challenge:
The biggest challenge faced in this project was the incredibly rapid
development timeline. The project was originally slated as an 10-12 week
project and was meant to integrate into the current retail POS system supported
by another vendor. Microsoft had just released its beta version of SQL
Reporting Services, and after consulting with the Microsoft technical
specialist and the client it was decided that Reporting Services would offer an
excellent platform to produce these web based reports with such an
aggressive delivery schedule. The only other alternative to allow seamless
integration into the existing POS system would have been hand-coded .Net pages
and that approach would be bumping close against the project deadline.
Results:
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Greater business agility
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Better use of management team
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Single view of business data
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50 percent lower development costs
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70 percent faster project timeline
In leveraging SQL Reporting Services for the client we were able to
reduce the development phase of the project from 10 weeks down to 4
weeks. Needless to say, the client was very pleased. Upon
successful
deployment of the solution the client realized and estimated savings of $65,000
annually in reduced financial management and
bookkeeping costs.
Technologies Deployed:
Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, Windows 2003
Standard Server, Microsoft ASP .Net.
Awards:
MS $25k - Microsoft issued a Partner Recognition award
for this project due to its complexity and the fact that this was the first
solution of its kind in North America to successfully combine all of these
related technologies.
InfoWorld 100 Award - Top 100 Web-based data collection and reporting solution.
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