Newsletters
Global Report Generator (GRG)
- A business intelligence solution
- High level features
- Technical platform
- Presenting the data
- Operational data
View the Global Report Generator operational flow chart (PDF).
Read related newsletter articles (PDFs):
- 2004
- Quarter four
- Quarter three
A business intelligence solution
The aim of the Global Report Generator is to reverse the trend whereby a business spends more time processing data than participation in business decision-making. The product provides operational and financial reporting which needs to be flexible enough to support dynamic business structures and aims.
The key to effective reporting is not only being able to understand and interpret the underlying systems data but equally to be able to relate that data to the aims of the business. Global Report Generator facilitates this by providing a simple Microsoft wizard-style interface combined with powerful and flexible configuration facilities. This enables the user to define the exact content of the data they want quickly and easily with the resulting data being saved and re-run at any time. Along with structured reporting, GRG will enable you to track and report these elements separately in a concise and efficient manner.
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The ability for the end user to easily extract all key operational and financial data.
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Total user ownership of content and format of extracted data.
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The ability to include all corporate structures and multiple entities to enable group-wide reporting or drill-down analysis to individual site level.
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Extracts for trend analysis and ad-hoc reporting can be generated swiftly with separate extracts also being provided for structured reporting.
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Data extraction in multiple formats to SQL server, XLS (Excel), DBF (Visual Foxpro) or CSV format (comma separated).
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Full ODBC compliance enabling data to be uploaded to almost any reporting tool or Microsoft Office product for facilities such as mail-merge.
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A number of user defined templates can be set up enabling users to re-run, save and archive specific formats of extracts at any time to report libraries.
We have chosen Microsoft SQL Server as our preferred database for maximum security, data integrity and scalability. However, we recognise that some clients will have already invested in other technologies and GRG will therefore also publish data in a number of industry standard formats enabling the content to be uploaded to most database systems.
The resulting data may be queried or manipulated using a large range of commodity end user packages or uploaded into third party reporting tools. For those clients who do not want the technical overhead of using such reporting tools for data presentation, Coldharbour provide the BVxL module which can be used in conjunction with GRG to create operational and financial reports. BVxL creates a dynamic link to the data within GRG through Microsoft Excel providing a reporting interface that users are familiar with and which is easy to use.
