Report management and mining— Adding value front to back

IBM specializes in high-speed loading and indexing on import, and features a split-screen interface for searching and sorting reports. It offers both index-based searching and full-text search within reports using the Find function in Word. It also lets users identify individual statements as PDFs within a print file and permits forms to be overlaid on report data so users can see it in meaningful spreadsheet columns and rows with headers and fields, instead of in the specialized arrangement of greenbar reports. It offers multiple report displays designed for different common user groups.

Sorts can be segmented and bundled, then exported into database and spreadsheet applications for further analysis. IBM FileNet also puts strong emphasis on compliance with capabilities like retention policy creation.

Other vendors

Hyland Software and Oracle Stellent offer report management, although less so report mining. In its "Magic Quadrant for Integrated Document Archive and Retrieval Systems, 2006," Gartner indicates that Hyland offers report management as an add-on component of its OnBase ECM suite. Hyland has much legacy COLD and imaging expertise, so it has nicely evolved into report management and excels in financial services, healthcare and back-office applications like accounts payable. Report management and the OnBase suite share a common repository for PDFs and images, and Hyland’s traditional customers are SMBs.

Stellent also provides report management as part of its ECM suite, but the Gartner report says the product is a departmental imaging and report management solution.

Benefits and target markets

The benefits of report management and mining are obvious and persuasive. The systems enable much lower costs and much faster reports, because reports are automatically distributed and opportunistically printed instead of comprehensively printed and manually distributed, thus saving on mailing costs too. Users, of course, can also find report data faster using index or template searching. What’s more, many companies archive all print output from ERP and other sources to comply with regulatory requirements.

Chin says report management and mining vendors target companies in banking and finance, insurance, utilities and telecommunications that have to export lots of data from legacy systems and otherwise print out and mail it. Some cater to call centers, too, so reps can pull up bills in the report form that emulates the bills about which customers are calling.

Report management as a service

docHarbor offers hosted report management and mining, so customers benefit from all the strengths of an application service provider (ASP) solution—low risk (they can unplug at any time), small capital investment, periodic leasing fees, quick and easy deployment (on average 42 days), no investment in equipment or personnel and free upgrades and maintenance.

It’s a hands-off solution because docHarbor personnel perform gritty activities like custom indexing and defining templates. The solution also plays with the other modules of the document management suite—capture, document management, disaster recovery and business process management.

Janet Ward, VP and solutions architect, explains that users just hit a button to display in Report Mine format and the report comes up in the document management system. Users can export reports to Word files or databases and store them in the document management repository.

Via a set of APIs, docHarbor quickly integrates with various portals and other applications. It runs on a Unix back end with an interface, so it’s a robust platform that users can also take advantage of to copy data into applications like Excel, Word, Access, Lotus 1-2-3 and PowerPoint, using the copy and paste functionality built into Windows.

docHarbor manages print streams from most legacy systems like ERP, accounting, IBM mainframe- and AS400-based systems. It auto-indexes and allows for text searching within a report and stores report data in spreadsheet format to which, with the OEM’d Datawatch (datawatch.com) Monarch report mining tool, users can apply various form templates to view PDFs and other data in ways most meaningful to different groups.

Ward says users or docHarbor personnel can also do sorts of all types—like segmenting data from multiple reports and reassembling it in one report or sorting by column in a table-formatted report in ascending and descending order, adding new calculated fields of data using formulas and functions, summarizing data with subtotals, grand totals and automatic graphs, and viewing multiple copies of the same report in one report mining session to compare trends.

According to Ward, with report mining users can summarize data, combine data across different dates of a report, view specific information embedded within the data, and filter and graph the data in a way that makes sense. For instance, the system can select credit card transactions across a date range of the previous 30 days for a given account and combine them into one report. "It is often a timely, costly and inefficient process to request IT programming resources to build multiple versions or views of existing report data," she says.

docHarbor administrators also apply security levels for users that determine which reports they can see and what features they can use.

docHarbor caters to the banking, brokerage and insurance markets and companies with at least $250 million in revenues and more than 1,000 employees. Price ranges from fractions of a cent to a few cents a page stored, with the price falling as the volume rises. There’s a small start-up fee, and the ASP charges an extra monthly fee for report mining.