Reporting System

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Travel Information Facilities used my consultancy services to review their current system, their data and a viable replacement product. Their legacy reporting system was archaic in the extreme in that it was inflexible, produced only CSV outputs and had to be produced by the vendor themselves. If a report was requested, it could take up to 2 weeks to be developed and placed in the main application. Sometimes, due to the vendor's workloads, it would not be produced at all.

The MD and his staff realised this was a major problem, so I was drafted in to review and recommend a replacement. They had two short listed already - Board and Tableau.

I recommended Tableau, and supported this view with the benefits of a server based self-service system along with pricing of all the various components. After some fine tuning and discussions the go ahead was given.

During the first 3 months of my tenure at TIF I produced a multitude of ERD's in order to create a robust 3NF reporting structure and developed both the reporting database and SSIS packages required to kick start this major upgrade for TIF. Test systems were used for trial versions of Tableau and SQL and UATs for initial major reports were held.

I conducted a series of workshops, along with external trainers to showcase the visualisations of Tableau and helped users understand how to use it.

The system went live circa month 6. A permanent BI developer was hired and I mentored both him and the existing reporting staff member.