Crystal Xcelsius Provides Dashboards for Connexions

Connexions offer a service to all young people aged between 13 and 19, or up to 25 for young people who have learning difficulties and disabilities. They employ Personal Advisers who are able to give advice and guidance on issues young people may be faced with, whatever they are. Connexions Personal Advisers are available in schools, colleges and information centres across Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton. 

Connexions were first introduced to Contemporary when they attended one of their regular training courses and were invited to a business intelligence seminar to see BusinessObjects Performance Management solutions. After a simple on-site meeting, Crystal Xcelsius, from Business Objects, was identified as the ideal solution. Crystal Xcelsius provides everything needed to create interactive business dashboards that connect to Excel spreadsheets or any external data source using web services, XML and other connectors. Teams are then able to share these business dashboards “live” within PowerPoint, Word, PDF, Outlook and the Web. 

Dashboards Improve Management

Connexions South Central had a core business need to develop a suite of dashboards to be used primarily for presentation to the board. They especially needed to have some means of showing performance against predefined governmental targets from the Department for Education & Skills. The solution not only needed to be easily understandable, clear and in an “at a glance” format but also easy to use in house, inexpensive, flexible and easy to distribute. 

Connexions’ data is stored in a single database which produces monthly management information statistics. They needed to manipulate these figures into something more than just numbers and percentages and had no system or tools in place to show trends over time, comparisons between areas or performance against targets. They needed to be able to identify problem areas and key points which needed the most attention to identify why performance was bad or good.

Xcelsius Reports and Training

Initial discussions involved going through their database structure, the different options of Xcelsius versions, the likely basic data queries and how this would fit in with their solution. The next step was to have a Contemporary consultant on-site for approximately 2 weeks to write all the background code required and to create the initial test dashboards. Since then, training has enabled Connexions to be able to modify these dashboards in-house, to fit business requirements.    

Further new dashboards have now been developed as recipients have realised the potential of the dashboards and delved deeper into the questions they want answering.

The resulting solution is a suite of easy to read and interactive performance management dashboards which can be used at all levels of the organisation. They can easily be managed and controlled in-house thus meeting Connexions requirements for self-sufficiency.

Contemporary
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