Mine Company Case Study

Following from the CFO's delemina described on our Home Page AFP Consulting was engaged to assist with the accounting and business systems problem of the mine company.

Project Management. The work commenced with a Management Reports Workshop where the information requirements and reporting process bottlenecks were brainstormed. The outcome of this workshop was a proposed system solution that would provide the efficiency gains and management information that the managers were seeking. This system requirements is shown in the sketchup shown here.

Requirements Document. The sketchup ensures a clear understanding of the work. It is a high level diagram that from a systems point of view that encapsulates what the requirements of the project are and what the project intends to achieve .

The Solution Following the workshop a number of new accounting systems were proposed but it was apparent that accounting systems are designed according to strict accounting principles of control of data. A major issue the company wanted to resolve was the ability to combine data from non financial sources with its financial data and then use both sets of data to produce reports. Another major issue the company wanted to address was the replacement of some of the multiple spreadsheets used to produce reports. These problems are classic issues that a data mart is designed to resolve. We set about finding a data mart solution for this mine company.

Datamart. A data mart for the purposes of this exercise is a software application that enables us to get data from different data sources, to transform that data for different purposes (eg cleaning it up, combining it and manipulating it) and then uses this new combined data for our report writing.

Results. This project was driven by a need to be more efficient and cut down on the time taken to produce management reports by cutting out the time taken to combine data from different data sources to produce the reports. This aim was achieved by using the facilty of Qreport Builder to combine data from Excel and QuickBooks The second aim was to obtain reports in the layout wanted by management. These layouts were not available in the exisitng system. This aim was achieved by using the industrial strength report writer in the QReportBuilder. Having achieved the two aims of the project which were to make the report production process more efficient it opened up the world of Business Intelligence,

The next case study will look at data marts and what is meant by Business intelligence