Case Study

Background:
With 8,000 employees and offices that span 60 locations across 25 US states, plus Mexico, Canada and Pueto Rica, Outsourcing Solutions Inc. (OSI)—headquartered in St. Louis—is the nation’s leading provider of receivables management services. OSI’s revenue exceeded $600 million last year. The use of enterprise wide technology, like Crystal Enterprise, plays a crucial role in OSI’s proven leadership and dominance it its field.

Business issue:

• Significantly reduce time and effort to reschedule hundreds of reports after software upgrade

When OSI decided to upgrade their Crystal Enterprise environment from version 8.5 to version 9.0, it became quite apparent that the manual effort to reschedule hundreds of previously scheduled reports after the upgrade was going to be a manually daunting and time consuming task. Mr. Petry knew this because of an incident that occurred during a Labor Day holiday last year. Crystal automatically ran the reports on that day, but the source database anticipated the holiday and knowingly did not update its information. This disconnect led to the manual rescheduling of the reports—and the redeployment of a critical resource. “We had a contractor working on other aspects of these reports, scheduling them for distribution for a quick deployment after the holiday,” recalled Mr. Petry. “Unfortunately, because the reports ran prematurely, we had to redeploy the contractor to reschedule all the reports after the database was updated the day after the holiday. It took him nearly 10 hours to do this through the existing scheduling tools in CE,” he said. And he added: “Since then, the demand for reports has increased significantly. We now have about 350 on-line users and over 1300 different types of reports. It was imperative to find a better way to schedule and maintain hundreds of reports with minimal resources.”

Solution:

• Use the APOS InfoScheduler BI Tool

When Mr. Petry found out about InfoScheduler, he wanted to know if this tool would do the job. He evaluated the product and the demo version quickly proved its value. InfoScheduler turned out to be a quick and inexpensive way to solve what was potentially a costly problem. “We were able to bulk reschedule reports after the upgrade with minimal staff and in a very short period of time. Using report parameters fed in via InfoScheduler, we are able to quickly set up and maintain the scheduled instances,” he said.

Results:

• Reduced report scheduling set up time from hours to minutes, resulting in significant savings in time and resources

Anytime you can reduce an activity from hours to minutes, it gives you the opportunity to reduce costs while optimizing staff usage. “InfoScheduler has saved us time, money and—more importantly—increased the productivity of my development staff. I can use the critical skills of my staff for real value-add activities,” said Mr. Petry.

Why APOS?
APOS Systems Inc. has been a VAR for Crystal Decisions since 1996. APOS recognized a key Crystal Enterprise strength—its open architecture—and has developed a variety of BI Tools that offer customers additional capabilities within the enterprise infrastructure. When asked why he chose APOS, Mr. Petry said “APOS is a unique supplier of tools like these for the CE environment. After doing some testing with these tools, we quickly understood how they could positively impact our productivity and environment. We are now evaluating their Object Manager tool.”

For more information:
Allan Pym, VP Sales and Chief Operating Officer
519.666.2020 or apym@apos.com