MI REPORTING CASE STUDYCOMPASS GROUP PLC

REPLACED EXCEL SPREADSHEETS WITH A SLICK MANAGEMENT INFORMATION REPORTING SYSTEM

Compass Group PLCis the largest contract foodservice company in the world, operating in over 50 countries and serving 4 billion meals a year

WHO IS COMPASS GROUP PLC

Data relating to 15 business-critical

Key Performance Indicatorswas fed into Excel from SAP,

Cognos and other reporting tools. The output was

a 250MB spreadsheet that was almost

impossible to open and even harder to

interpret.

COMPASS’S CHALLENGE AND OUR SOLUTION

Working directly with the business, we designed

and built a Management Information Reporting System

that organised the data basedon the business’s requirements

and presented it in a user friendly interface.

WHAT WE DELIVERED

An online Management Information Reporting System

» Business analysis » Legacy systems audit » User research and definition » Information Architecture » Interactive prototyping » Interface design » Testing

SKILLS USEDWe looked into the requirements of the business to establish what reports senior management needed, what decisions they would make and what actions they would take.

Our UX investigation looked into the data presentation requirements, devices used by management, information sharing needs, access control, as well as viewing behaviour and context: session length, frequency, location, solitary vs group viewings, etc. We then translated the spreadsheets into a series of interfaces weaved into a stand-alone interactive prototype. The prototype was circulated within the business and road-tested by numerous end-users returning some very insightful feedback. The broad testing had the additional benefit of significantly increasing the business’s awareness of the project which in turn led to a higher adoption rate upon launch.

HOW WE DID IT - THE BUSINESS & USER EXPERIENCE ANGLES

» Database design » Stored Procedures » SQL » .NET

SKILLS USED

» DevExpress » .NET » SQL » SQL Reporting Services

TECHNOLOGIES USED

There were four components to our technical solution:

The import routine’s goal was to enable importing one month’s worth of Excel data within 30 seconds, with error handling messaging built-in.

The database design (built in Microsoft SQL Server) had to be flexible and scalable enough to allow reporting variations, and still show trend data.

The business logic, implemented as Stored Procedures, allowed for rapid calculations of only a few milliseconds and in turn report creation over a 3G or weaker signal.

As with many corporates, browser restrictions were in-play, so we used our standard cross-browser compatible toolkit of DevExpress for rapid deployment of a consistent front-end.

HOW WE DID IT - THE TECHNOLOGY ANGLE

THE OUTCOME

95% 76%

Cumbersome, error-prone and hard-to-manage spreadsheets were replaced with a single, fast, logical, and well designed online reporting tool that allows management to

access accurate, up-to-date information and make better informed decisions.

of users rated the tool to be from good to excellent

of users stated that the new tool has saved them

time when reviewing and analysing performance data