Millennium Dome
...Challenge "The objective of the project is to provide analysis tools to enable additional reporting and functionality for decision making, above that, which can currently be provided within existing operational systems. This will include comparisons against external data sources, summary and interrogation capability and scenario analysis." We identified three critical phases to ensure the challenge was met: Defining Variables: Internal Departments were accessing data and making decisions based on information from a variety of host systems. In many cases this information was manually extracted, had not been validated and often conflicted with information presented by other departments. It was necessary to agree reporting definitions business-wide and ensure that all decision-makers bought into these standardised definitions. Consolidation: Various internal departments owned data stores and information was not shared amongst all decision-makers throughout the organisation. Information held in one data source was at a different level of detail to another data source and as a result was not being used for analysis purposes. Decisions were made based on analysis of only a portion of the available data. Automation: Manual extraction processes meant that departments were making decisions based on redundant information. Due to manual extraction processes, relevant data was not always available for analysis when required. It was necessary to ensure that relevant information was available at a consistent time and in a usable format. The same reports needed to be produced at the same time for quality analysis to take place and meaningful decisions to be made. The Solution The project was approached in an iterative manner, whereby there were a number of phases that sought to add to the initial delivery, both in terms of the type and detail of the available data. The initial stage concentrated on a basic summary-level comparison of budgeted and actual sales utilising Excel ADO VB Programming. Work was specifically restricted to reporting budgeted and actual ticket yields. Applix TM1 (OLAP) was selected as the preferred analytical reporting tool over Business Objects and Cognos. This selection was based on TM1's integration into the organisations existing IT infrastructure and its platform stability. Data was extracted by scheduled events from the various transactional...