A retail client with 10+ locations required their store managers to run some sales reports from the POS daily and fax them into home office. The data from those faxes was then keyed into a spreadsheet which was then distributed to management. The POS vendor was polling the stores daily and summarizing the data in a warehouse that was available for reporting. The problem was that the reporting tool was very inflexible and couldn’t summarize the data in a useful format.
During conversations with the POS vendor I discovered that they could replicate the sales data to an internal SQL Server database. Once we initiated that process it was just a matter of building the operational reports using SQL Server Reporting Services. A simple scheduler program distributed the reports daily to everyone that needed them.
Skills: Business analysis, database design and development, reporting
Tools: SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services