Project Background

At the time we were engaged Standard Pacific Corp had previously implemented a partial reporting solution from Business Objects that wasn’t really being utilized. They were doing most of their reporting using a combination of some existing BO reports and Microsoft Access against JD Edwards as their source. It’s not uncommon for larger companies implement Business Intelligence solutions and not have them fully utilized. Microsoft Access was being used primarily as an Analysis tool. Other Vendor solutions are fairly complex and require multiple skills in IT as well as end users need to be trained in the tools. Executives rarely take to such tools and go back to the basics using Microsoft Excel and in this case Access.

Standard Pacific Corp initially asked Laminar Consulting services to assist in the development of a PerformancePoint proof of concept in order to demonstrate the value of Enterprise Reporting and Analytics to executive management. Standard Pacific had already implemented SharePoint but it wasn’t being fully utilized as a reporting display mechanism. The premise was to put up something in a short amount of time and get business users to embrace the portal for reporting purposes.

Laminar was tasked to provide assistance in the areas of architectural oversight and construction of the BI process and application. The first phase consisted of planning and development of the Staging Database the Operational Data Store and the Datamart. Initially data was to be extracted and pulled from different systems and combined however as the project progressed it was later decided first version would only include financial data for quarterly reporting. The housing market was drastically changing and they needed to get reporting streamlined. These reports where ultimately pushed up into SharePoint and displayed as Dashbords via Microsoft Reporting Services.