Project. EDFacts Reporting System

Customer Background. Perot Systems was awarded a contract to establish a reporting environment based on the Department of Education transactional database system. The Department has extensive reporting requirements. Perot Systems established the reporting system. The bulk of the reporting system was from a transactional system, requiring extensive customized coding.

Business Challenge. MicroLink was engaged to assume responsibility for administration and maintenance of the system, maintenance of existing reports, extensive development of new reports, and portal redesign. Initial challenges included:

• Administrative tasks needed to be defined and documented
• Several complex manual processes needed to be analyzed, documented, and made more efficient
• New reports needed to be created
• Existing reports needed to be analyzed and documented
• Configuration management processes needed to be established

Solution. MicroLink provided senior business intelligence resources, proficient in Cognos, to manage and analyze the current environment as well as define and document current processes. MicroLink professionals are providing the following efforts:

• Maintaining the Cognos UNIX server environment, including applying patches, restarting the processes when necessary, and implementing deployments
• Analyzing and documenting processes involving loading data, stored procedures, and very complex SQL statements
• Creating a type of ERD for many of the reporting tables
• Creating new reports including fleshing out documentation and processes
• Creating weekly and monthly reports for the client based system usage
• Maintaining the current security model (Security is maintained in both an active directory server and the Sun one directory server)
• Working with the client to create the new security model
• Understanding the client’s data model and translating the model into report functionality
• Creating and updating scripts to correct errors in the data in both Oracle and SQL Server databases
• Maintaining three server environments (test, development, production) within UNIX AIX

Technologies or Products and Services Provided by MicroLink.

• Cognos ReportNet
• UNIX AIX administration

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