Bespoke Data Solutions

A bespoke data solution is appropriate wherever there is a requirement for delivering data in a form that is not directly available.

You may already be using a data warehouse or datamarts, for example Orchard’s IMS and datamart solutions. While these provide simplified data access for reporting and dashboards, scenarios often arise where further data processing is necessary to produce a solution:

Data is not directly available, eg aggregation or calculation is required
Data is not available from a single source, eg assembling and consolidating data from different modules or systems is required
Data needs adjustment to reflect business processes
Performance improvements are required, eg through pre-aggregation
Requirements for meta-data or data quality analysis and monitoring
Requirements for interfaces or data transfer
Integrating geospatial data into data-marts e.g. maps incorporating data like repairs costs or arrears
Taking data snapshots periodically to build up a history that would otherwise be lost

Does any of the following sound familiar?

Business Objects cannot report on certain data, or Business Objects universes do not include certain data
Business Objects universes do not always work as expected, some objects are incompatible
Some Business Objects reports take ages to run
We need to extract data using Business Objects then open into Excel and do processing, summarising etc - it would be much better to do all this in the report
We need to extract data to feed into an external system, but there is no interface available to do this
We cannot report on historical data because Orchard Housing does not keep a full history of all changes
We need to adjust data (eg arrears balances but could be anything) to reflect the way our business views the data
We would like to combine data to enable reporting from various systems, eg Finance, Housing, Asset Management etc
We need to be able to report on the overall costs of a service (eg repairs, income management), and to report against budgets
We have custom BPM functionality, but we can’t report on it
We need web-based dashboards, and Business Objects does not provide this
We need to combine geographical data with Orchard Housing data
Business Objects is too expensive, too complex and doesn't meet our needs

If so a bespoke data solution could be the answer.

Benefits

Presents data according to business requirements
Reports and dashboards lead to performance enhancements
Combine data from several sources to provide new insights
Understand and monitor data quality

Here are some examples of Amber Green solutions

Income Management

This data and reporting solution was developed to meet a requirement to adjust the arrears figures to take into account late payments. This adjusted data is simply not avilable within Orchard Housing, and cannot easily be acheivied using standard Business Objects reporting tools.

The solution also includes many other calculated values such as:

Sub account arrears
Annual debits
Cumulative 12 month income
Percentage arrears and rent collected
Counts of arrears actions by status
Income breakdown

Weekly and monthly rent accounts are included enabling reporting of the adjusted arrears over weekly periods along with the other calculated values and combined with arrears actions summary. This sort of report could not be acheived using standard data and reporting tools.

See example snippet of the report:

Data Quality

The requirement here was to take snapshots of Orchard Housing person data to enable monitoring over time and report on data quality in terms of the completeness (ie existance of valid data values) of each data item. This included standard data such as Date of Birth, Ethnicity, phone and email contact details etc and also custom data help in Orchard BPM EDR tables. By extracting the data into SQL Server it was possible to combine data from the two separate Orchard databases into a single table and so easily report on the whole data set.

In particular, the housing provider was interested into the impact of the customer census surveys they were undertaking, and were able to monitor this by taking snapshots before and after the surveys.

A custom Business Objects was developed to provide easy to use reporting functionality, and several reports were created as shown in the example.

Payment Monitoring Predictor

This system uses existing rent payment data from Orchard Housing and applies an algorithm to evaluate the payment frequency and from that anticipated date of next payments. When expected payment are not received the report flags the period using colour coding to indicate the where there is a missing payment and whether is due soon.

So in the example report shown, the red rows indicate a missing payment, while the orange row indcates a payment is due soon. Additional parameters can be set to use a different colour coding to indicate where tenants in credit are getting close to being in arrears.

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