Dashboard Project History 
Historically, Connexions South Central, like many other government agencies who are tasked with monitoring and achieving ‘targets’, spent large amounts of both user and IT department time and resource in trying to achieve this objective.
The Challenge
"I was able to create a new Dashboard in a little over 20 minutes and it works dynamically and quickly. We no longer have problems with Excel spreadsheet or XML maps, and the Web Service Generator makes linking data to Dashboards simple"
Jo CrombieManagement Information Analyst
Connexions South Central
Driven by the requirements of Connexions Customer Information System (CCIS), Connexions South Central chose to implement the CorePlus database application developed by Careervison from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) specifications. However, whilst this provided a sophisticated bespoke user friendly database and data input application, provision for data output in simple easy to understand graphical form was not within the specification.
The Problems
Connexions needs to analyse and interpret large amounts of data from their CorePlus database. They need an easy and effective process to report performance to board level and for all users to monitor targets, eg. NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), simply and graphically, on a regular monthly basis. This issue will be even more important in 2008 when funding sources change to Local Authorities.
Business Objects Xcelsius formed the basis of Connexions South Centrals approach to tracking their performance against the Key Performance Indicators issued by DfES. However, their solution was far from perfect due to unforeseen data update and slow speed issues. The fast dynamic powerful dashboards Connexions had anticipated, were not possible to create. These disappointing results were an ongoing issue for twelve months.
Flynet's Solution
Flynet WSGd dramatically altered the expectations and scope of the project. Data update problems were quickly resolved and it soon became apparent that the real power of Xcelsius could be used to it’s full extent.
Web Service Generator automatically wrote all the code needed to connect digital dashboards to the live data via an XML based web service. The deployed web service extracts data from the proprietary SQL database (eg. NEET) in real time as and when it is needed and presents this for consumption by Crystal Xcelsius.
Speed of implementation is an inherent advantage with Flynet's connectors; no coding effort is required to generate a real time link between the databases and the dashboards. The DfES and several peer connexions agencies have recently invested in similar solutions from Flynet.
Summary
Original in-house solution proved unmanageable and inflexible to maintain due to data update functionality limitations, resulting in a time consuming routine every month. - Try before you buy evaluation proved successful with Connexions SQL database data.
- Flynet offer joint maintenance, support and consultancy services for both Xcelsius and WSGd.
- The main areas of improved performance for Connexions are:
- Opens up the possibility of utilising drill down services for more in-depth analysis of data.
- Provides the opportunity to include numerous issues on one dashboard to demonstrate how many datasets are related.
- Dashboard creation is a simpler and faster process – “Flynet enabled us to set up a new dashboard in about twenty minutes”.
- The need to spend one day a month on data refresh activity is eliminated.
Flynet and Business Objects are pleased to announce the combination of Xcelsius and Web Service Generator for Databases into Xcelsius Engage Server.