Highlands College Use Crystal Reports to Streamline Business Processes

Set on the beautiful island of Jersey, Highlands College, a forward thinking institution offering high quality lifelong learning opportunities, wanted to ensure that critical information was delivered to key decision makers when they needed it, in a format that suited them, without having to invest in major infrastructure enhancements.

THE CHALLENGE

Even though management information was available through internal systems, such as the College Intranet, it was not being accessed on a regular enough basis to meet the demands of the business.

“The College had gone full circle with information. We needed a system that could ‘push’ the information out to key decision makers within the College in a secure and accessible format that they could understand and at regular intervals”, said Mark Macdonald, Information Systems Manager, Highlands College.

“Faculty Heads wanted to see information relating to the College application process. There was a full intake of students due and we needed reliable and automated reports to display information such as how many potential students had applied at course level, on a weekly basis. We also needed to provide a weekly ‘snapshot’ report that delivered information relating to attendance, withdrawals and who was at risk”.

THE APPROACH

"Crystal Reports is the best report writer out there"

Highlands College already had considerable in-house Crystal Reports report writing expertise and had been using the tool for some ten years. They also had a robust hardware infrastructure in place and a SQL Server that would allow for the easy integration of the Crystal Reports Server software. There was also a requirement for a system that would easily integrate into the College’s Microsoft Access, Oracle and Unit-e Report Generator and warehouse applications.

According to Mark, “Crystal Reports has a good name in the market and when considering our requirements we concluded that Crystal Reports Server ticked all of the boxes. It enabled the automatic distribution of reports, had an easy-to-use interface, was easy to update and finally offered seamless integration into our existing network and database infrastructure”.

THE IMPLEMENTATION

Once Highlands College took the decision to proceed with Crystal Reports Server, a DSCallards Consultant visited the College and had the system up and running within half a day. A week later the College was distributing reports live to the Faculty Heads on a weekly basis. The process is automated and the reports run once a week at 9 pm and are distributed to the Faculty Heads in PDF format directly into their email account at 7 am the next day.

Before the Crystal Reports Server implementation, validation of data was carried out on an ad-hoc basis as workloads allowed. As a result of the project, validation reports will be run on a regular basis leading to cleaner data.

THE RESULTS

The implementation of Crystal Reports Server has brought about a number of improvements in the way that the College generates and delivers reports. They have found the system to be very robust, stable and reliable. The system links seamlessly into the College’s Microsoft Exchange Server and has saved in infrastructure costs as Crystal Reports integrates into all well known networks and back-end databases.

"Once set up and running, we were able to forget about it"

“Once the system was set up and running, we were able to forget about it, freeing up precious time to get on with other projects”. Mark went onto say, “As a process of continuous improvement, Highlands College has a number of technology investment plans in the pipeline and as we move forward into the future, we will be fully utilising the power of Crystal Reports to help us to bring about these changes”.

WHY DSCALLARDS?

As the winner of the prestigious Business Objects EMEA Reseller of the Year Award 2007, DSCallards has been harnessing the power of Crystal Reports for fifteen years, helping thousands of organisations through support, training and consulting services to deliver business innovation.

Download a PDF of the Highlands Case Study - here

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