Services

Data Marts and Reporting Consolidation Solutions

Licensee Information Network
Business Case: International executive search firm with over 65 licenses/offices worldwide. All of the offices run independently of one another and are not connected by any telecommunications infrastructure, such as a WAN. This client needed a means to share and update information relating to themselves and job searches.
Solution: Developed Licensee Information Network, which is a secured Internet site offering users access to the Company Directory, Job Search Information, Company Policies and Procedures, and various discussion forums. The solution has two components, Administration and Internet. The Administration component is a client-server solution, accessible by assigned personnel, to maintain profile information, edit and approve Job Searches, and maintain security profiles. The Internet component offers users the ability to electronically submit and manage their Job Searches and provide robust reporting either by printing or downloading directly from the Internet.

Market Model

Business case: This client manually compiled consolidated market share reports using a myriad of Excel spreadsheets for a large set of financial products. Upwards of 10 data feeds from financial institutions (i.e., Reuters, Bloomberg, SDC Financial, etc.) were imported by hand into MS/Excel spreadsheets and manually edited. This was a tedious and error prone process that literally took several man-weeks to accomplish. Cross-product market share analysis was deemed too labor prohibitive to accomplish.

Solution: Online Solutions recommended that a comprehensive parse and reporting application be developed that would both automate the importing of the data feeds and dramatically improve the accuracy of the current reports. Online Solutions further worked with this client to develop a model in which Merger and Acquisition data could be correlated to other products (i.e., Bonds, Converts, Equities, Loans) to produce meaningful cross-product market share reporting. This was accomplished by developing a formula to equate the market share amounts for M&A to the other products. A comprehensive user-interface was developed that allowed business analysts and management to view multiple reports simultaneously. Finally, an OLAP approach to fitting the data together was undertaken. A multi-dimensional array (a.k.a. a 'cube') was produced that interfaced with Crystal reports to allow the end-user to perform 'what if' type analyses (i.e., flipping reports from product market share to competitor market share with drill-down to the underlying transactional data).