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Knowledge is Power – Empowering Users with Effective Reporting

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Session Number: 27025
Track: Reporting
Sub-Categorization: Reporting Tools
Session Type: Case Study
Presenter: Neil King (University of Cambridge)

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Target Audience: Functional
Audience Level: General
Level of Customization: Bolt-On
Project Phase: Production
Project Go Live: Q3 2009
Version Presenting: PS 9.0
Product: PeopleSoft
CPE Eligible: No

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One of the key goals of any IT application must be to deliver a solution that allows its users to carry out their daily business processes as effectively and efficiently as possible. A big enabler of this is the ability to retrieve relevant data from the system as quickly and easily as possible and then to be able to act on this data to carry out their business activity. This requirement is often complicated by the user’s desire to have the ability to run these reports on an adhoc basis, selecting the fields they want to return, and the criteria they want to use, on a report by report basis.

At Cambridge we have developed an integrated reporting tool that takes our users along way towards achieving this. We have developed a tool, CamSIS (Cambridge Student Information System) Search, that gives users both large flexibility over the fields they return (over 120) and the criteria they are able to search on (over 40) with the ability to carry the returned search data through to 18 different areas of the system to update/maintain. The tool also enables emailing to the students/applicants returned and the ability to create, save and update searches where they may be useful in the future.

To complement the CamSIS Search tool, we have also developed a data filtering product using Oracle Application Express (APEX) that we have integrated (seamlessly to our users) with Camus Solutions. This tool enables an even larger number of fields to be displayed. It also allows users to take advantage of all of the delivered functionality of APEX querying that comes straight out of the box with APEX.

CamSIS Search and APEX filtering are just part of our reporting strategy at Cambridge that delivers our users a system that empowers them to carry out their business processes as efficiently and effectively as possible. The presentation will demonstrate both the CamSIS Search and APEX filtering functionality along with a discussion on how we use these solutions along side such delivered tools as query manager, sql reporting and xml publisher. The presentation will provide a useful insight for others planning to embark on a similar project highlighting both our successes and some of the pitfalls we experienced along the way. For those with similar solutions in place already, it should provide a great talking point for some sharing of experience.