Project
Snapshot
A one-year visitor attraction funded by the government, The Millennium
Dome was an ambitious and complex project to establish a new £800
million visitor attraction in London.
On presentation to the Managing Director, of a "big picture" vision for establishing a Strategic Management Information Reporting Group, our team was established to provide process and information technology analysis reporting solutions to support the Business Management Team and external government departments.
A reporting suite was provided though the innovative use of Crystal reporting, Visual Basic and the TM1 OLAP tool, to allow integrated, real time reporting and in a format as required by management for real-time strategic decision-making.
By centralising the data and making it possible to analyse and manipulate it in real-time, sales reporting time was reduced by 70% and the information was more accurate. Prior to implementing, ticket sales management was a time consuming process, requiring a large amount of manual effort and numerous checks of the data. iFactor built an automated forecast model, which resulted in better quality forecasts and more time to analyse information.
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"Information solutions from iFactor enabled us to quickly communicate, measure and manage our progress toward key strategic goals and objectives across all business areas. Leading indicators alerted us to potential situations where we were not delivering, before any potential damage was incurred. This shift from reactive to proactive information management paid tremendous dividends for our company." P.Y. Gerbeau - CEO, Millennium Dome |
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The 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.
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Information
Development Process (click for full image)
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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 systems using Microsoft Data Transformation Services. These events were scheduled to occur on a nightly basis throughout the year to avoid any adverse impact on daily operational systems.
More complex reports were built to include aspects of allocations management and improve upon the yield management information. Budgeted data was restructured to reflect sales date (cash) as well as the existing admission date. Reports were distributed to executive management, operational departments and government bodies via Crystal Reports, automated daily emails, SMS and intranet.
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Information
Reporting Flow (click for full image)
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The final
stage involved "what if" scenario and trend analysis utilising
TM1's advanced business modelling functionality. Power users were trained
and empowered throughout the organisation and a strategic management information
group was established.
An executive information application (infocentre)was developed to allow real-time visitor analysis. This tool allowed operations to identify and resolve visitor "bottlenecks" before they became detrimental to the overall visitor experience. The tool was implemented on the admission lines, ticket control, operations human resources and desktops of the CEO and all directors.
