Analytical Reports
Increasingly, companies need to be able to correlate information. They need to be able to see inter-related information about customer purchases and their behavioral traits which are best described in analytical reports. Similarly, they need to correlate information about customer acquired and the sales earned from them. They also want to share content created in one subsidiary with another in another country and translate and use it rapidly.
A real time enterprise needs not only gain access to all this information in a cohesive manner but also be able to do this quickly. The advent of XML has considerably simplified the process of correlating disparate information by described its components at a more granular level with the help of tags to generate analytical reports. Once content descriptions are available at this level of detail, some extracts can be reused rapidly. With the use of XML, it is now possible to search simultaneously in relational databases as well as content repositories. Companies are now able to translate content in a repository in one country for use by another country without requiring the intervention of skilled translators.
MacDonald is a classic instance of a company that operates across national boundaries and has to work with repositories located in several different countries. In addition, it has numerous franchises working independently and loose time when they recreate the same content. In order to collate information from its subsidiaries, MacDonald has to be able to translate the content from several different languages and draw them from several different information systems to generate analytical reports. It also benefits from centralizing content creation and redistributes it to local units where it can be customized. All the content can be accessed from a portal.
Golden Gate Software’s Data Synchronization solution is an example which helps to use data from disparate sources in real time. It has been used in the health care industry by hospitals to collate information from individual hospitals and patient care centers in a single repository. With synchronized clinical and administrative data, one of its customers is able to produce detailed analytic reports to track patient metrics, length of stay, and other care management data.