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ERM/COLD
To thrive in today’s business economy you need efficient
and effective access to corporate information. ERM can give
your company the competitive edge its needs to succeed. ERM/COLD
or Greenbar reports, collect large quantities of information
through a period of time, for instance, all the transactions
performed at a large department store, college enrollment
records, bank records etc. This information is complied by
a system into a report. The process of generating useful reporting
and information from ERM/COLD is often difficult and awkward.
We have designed a system that uses a radically new paradigm
for making print reports more useful as a data mining tool.This
new process is much more cost effective, and quick to deliver
data than competitive systems now on the market. Traditionally,
ERM vendors index these reports on a set number of fields
and store them electronically for the customer to review at
a later date if necessary. There is no ability for a the data
to be sliced in a different way without the large cost of
generating a new report with new index fields and re-running
the data again.This is where the difference between our system,
and our competitors becomes apparent…
The Traditional Solution
ERM reports vary dependant on the type of business, for instance
a retail store might define payment method, amount of purchase,
and customer name as their most important criteria, whereas
a shipping company might define location, destination, and
timeframe as theirs. Regardless of the type of data generated,
the process remains the same. Records originate at point of
purchase or transaction. These records are then compiled and
reports are run against them at a determined time frame (end
of day, week, month). A copy of the data goes to raw storage
for backup. A “report” is run on the raw data
and is formatted for a print stream. Most ERM solutions run
reports before the record is formatted for the print stream.
This means that all of the report criteria must be predetermined.
This causes several problems.
Weak Search and Mining Capabilities
Information in non-predetermined fields is not available to
you when the report is run. This means that if after viewing
a report, it becomes clear that further refinement of the
data would be valuable, the process to accomplish this is
often cost prohibitive and certainly not timely.
Costly Upgrading Due to a Change in the Originating
Data
If the originating data structure changes, your pre-determined
fields become obsolete. For example, Home Depot upgrades their
point of sale systems that create the reports on the daily
transactions. Their new system will create new data structures
in new formats and the different layout will then not be recognized
by the ERM system.
Poor Abilities to Add Search Fields
Search criteria cannot be added easily because the reports
and the fields they are built to index on, are not changeable
on the fly. For example, Home Depot wants to start tracking
the average items per customer. The register system will be
able to generate this information. But, the ERM system will
not be able to perform searches on this new field because
it was not pre-determined. This change will be costly and
take time.
Our solution
Our solution uses a completely different philosophy, in which
we store the reports as fully searchable text. This allows
us to create any version of a report on the fly and for any
slice of time needed. The information originates at point
of purchase. A copy of the record is then sent to raw backup
just like other systems but, instead of running a report before
the information is compiled into a print stream, we scrape
ALL of the information from each record, this information
is then indexed in a digital text format, and saved. This
allows you to do several things that are either extremely
difficult or impossible for other ERM solutions. These include,
running reports on past records, changing search criteria,
and data mining. Since ALL of the information is scraped,
and saved in a digital format this gives you the flexibility
to perform searches on this information however you wish.
Since we also allow you to perform data mining on information
you will now be able to search for very discreet pieces of
information. Imagine instead of looking through miles and
miles of old green bar reports to find a specific bit of information,
you can type in the keyword and hit enter. If this sounds
like the ability to do a search just like Google does on the
Web, you are right on target.
We have also built a tool that allows our customers to configure
their own reports with a simple graphical user interface so
that they can bring a sample on the screen and simply highlight
the fields they would like to index. Want to change this report
tomorrow? Call it back up and highlight another two fields.
In addition, we provide overlay capabilities so that your
ERM data can look exactly like the printed form, and extensive
bursting features so that individual pages can be retrieved
from a large print stream.
We offer this capability through a Web-based platform that
allows properly authenticated users to view this data from
any Internet connection. This also allows our customers to
get out of the business of supporting old software versions,
servers, storage and employing IT people.
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