In January 2005, LiveLogic was hired by one of the leading mortgage lenders in the country to provide a
reporting and analysis enterprise dashboard for the financial planning and analysis division. The client needed a system that provides up to the day reports on company performance, and LiveLogic was able to
deliver.
The dashboard replaced a stagnant reporting system with a fully interactive analysis and ad hoc-capable
application made available solely through a web browser. The user-friendly system was configured so that any business analyst can modify existing reports or build new reports through a wizard-driven process without the help of a development team, allowing autonomous control of the system by the financial planning and
analysis division. Since everything takes place exclusively in a web browser, no desktop installation or
configuration is required.
Providing everything from branch financial reports and loan officer training history to cash flow and income
statements, the system allows analysts to evaluate company performance from the top of the chain all the way down to the loan officer at any of the company’s thousands of locations. This information can then be
analyzed against various training trends, tenure, prior experience, customers, loan size, and even show its
effect on the P&L.
Instead of wasting time and money on data that took days if not longer to produce, each branch of the
company now has scheduled batch reporting books in Adobe PDF available nightly. Executives are now able to build custom reports, or KPI (Key Performance Indicator) modules, based on their daily decision making habits.
This solution was a consolidation of many moving parts for the company into one collaborated result that performs more efficiently than any existing systems. It requires no desktop manipulation, is available through a secure page on the company intranet, and provides most of the functionality that any ad hoc analyst would generally need Microsoft Excel to complete, all of which took one developer five months to complete.
The platform for this application is Hyperion’s Essbase database, selected for its quick retrieval time. Batch reporting is generated via pure Java classes and XSL transformations to produce PDF reports using a
transformation library called FOP (Formatting Objects Processor). IBM’s DB2 AlphaBlox, in conjunction with custom Java Server Pages and various scripting languages, was chosen as the portal for this data because of its customization abilities and its easy to use web interface.
"My experience with LiveLogic was that they handled themselves in a professional and ethical manner becoming of a company of their stature."
-- Strategic Operations Manager
