At the beginning of each month, the IT Manger of a security firm spent about one-and-a-half days cutting and pasting data in order to produce monthly incident reports.
BACKGROUND
This security firm needs to track incident “hot spots” in order to tailor the services and level of attention it pays to each of its client sites. However, they had to manually run complex queries against a hierarchical database and then paste the data into Excel, the only reporting tool they knew how to use with confidence.
SOLUTION
We reengineered and optimized into stored procedures the queries for obtaining the incident data and then built SQL Server Reporting Services reports to provide a one-click solution to their reporting needs. Moreover, we developed new data visualizations to assist their decision making.
SUMMARY
By using some clever query techniques and SQL Server Reporting Services, we reduced the time it took to produce monthly incident reports from 1.5 days to a few minutes.