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Sector
Business and Manufacturing; Associations, Foundations and NGOs
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Partners
Microsoft
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Solution
Business Process, Business Intelligence, Document Managment
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Technology
NET, AJAX, SQL Server, ASP.NET, XML, DHTML, CSS
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The new STARS will facilitate the collection, processing and reporting of the sales data of all GAMA members. The system will include all of GAMA’s currently existing surveys and the respective reports and be designed to support new surveys and reports for non member data.
Due to GAMA’s current manual workload in assembling surveys and reports, the new system will be developed in two Releases:
Release 1 will go into production after 3-4 months and will allow GAMA to capture all data via the standard survey forms provided by MadWolf Technologies or via data upload through MS Excel files. The system will apply the disclosure rules and the validation rules and export the data into MS Excel, where the final report will be manually created by GAMA.
Release 2 will comprise the entire application as specified in this document and go into production 4-5 months after acceptance of Release 1.
The design of the new system will aim at avoiding the shortcomings and errors of the present STARS and offer the highest possible degree of usability and process automation. Therefore, the new STARS will provide its three user groups – GAMA Administrators, GAMA Data Entry Staff and Member Organization Staff – with their respective easy to use dashboard-type interfaces. These dashboards will be fully web based and constitute the central interface to all STARS functionality.
In contrast to the existing STARS, the new system will automatically enforce GAMA’s disclosure rules (consolidated companies will be treated as one single company) and generate the required footnotes. GAMA Administrators can edit and overwrite system suggestions for data rolling. The system will automatically adjust the footnotes based on this manual rolling.
STARS will accommodate and automate the data collection and report generation process to a very high degree. Members will automatically receive email notifications including a link to the respective data capture forms. If the data entry deadline is missed, the system will send out reminders every two days until the form is filled out. All data capture forms will validate the entered data in real time, based on a set of criteria defined by GAMA (see discussion of validation criteria in chapter IV). After the successful data entry procedure, members will receive an email confirmation and GAMA will be notified through a status report on the administrator dashboard. The system will then automatically roll the numbers and create the required footnotes according to GAMA’s disclosure rules. Where required, STARS will also cross check whether the figures of the quarterly report match the monthly figures and if aggregates used in one report equal the sum of values in the more fine grained report on the same type of device. Cross checks can be strictly enforced in terms of not allowing the member to submit data that does not exactly match the requirements or does not at least fall into a percentage corridor defined by GAMA. Alternatively, a cross check can trigger a warning that can be overwritten by the member. The results of this automated procedure can then be edited by GAMA staff, before publishing the finalized report to the dashboards of the individual member companies. All reports can be exported into Excel and PDF. The mission of this project is to create a software that is as easy to use as QuickBooks and as reliable as Oracle.
When creating new or editing existing surveys, reports or database views, there will be no manual editing of HTML, XML or SQL required. The new STARS Report and Survey Designer will offer an easy to use, fully visual, drag & drop type interface for this purpose.
The new STARS will also include a library where all previous reports, surveys and rolled raw data can be viewed and edited. Within this library, STARS administrators will be able to add data for previous months or send out email links to request data entry by member organizations.
Finally, the new system will make DB Visualizer redundant as it will include all of GAMA’s existing queries and views and allow the addition of ad-hoc custom queries to the dashboard.
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