XTRA Lease’s Enterprise Reporting environment had evolved over time and had become a combination of different versions/vendors and technologies; they wanted to standardize the ER capabilities to be more flexible, scalable, and user friendly.
XTRA Lease chose Microsoft for its business intelligence environment to standardize reporting and data analysis and performance management needs. In doing this XTRA Lease, was expecting to reduce costs and increase end user satisfaction in accessing data.
Solution
Covenant Technology Partners began with designing and implementing a Microsoft SQL Server based data warehouse solution including SQL Server Analysis services, Cubes with SharePoint and Excel based data analytics and Dashboard solutions.
XTRA Lease brought in Covenant Technology Partners to conduct an assessment of their existing enterprise reporting environment including technologies, processes, and end user capabilities. Based on the assessment; Covenant was able to design and plan for a Microsoft ER environment that provided the scalability and flexibility of XTRA Lease’s business needs.
The final solution replaced more than 6000 Business objects reports and many out of date data marts and ETL routines.
Implementation
The initial challenge of the current environment and upgrading was rationalizing the reporting requirements to determine what is needed and how to best provide that need to the client. Covenant used our ER roadmap methodology to evaluate the business reporting needs and further map those needs to the most effective technologies for XTRA Lease. The Covenant team brought a robust portfolio of templates and methodologies to accelerate the successful completing of the roadmap and the eventual design and build of the solutions. The Covenant Business Intelligence roadmap methodology has been proven with many successful engagements and incorporates best practices from Microsoft, the world wide BI community and Covenant’s experiences.
The final solution included only 70+ reports with an environment where end users could write own reports and connect to data using Excel. Valuable features, such as a report portal, were built on SharePoint and enabled end users to find all reports, dashboards, and abilities to further analyze data, in one location.
Success
XTRA Lease, with Covenant’s solution, was able to significantly reduce the cost of previous licenses and cost of ownership for their ER environment. And, additionally, dramatically improve the usability and business value of their ER capabilities.