Administaff Deploys Standardized, Expanded Online Reporting
Business owners who would like to spend more time building their companies and less time dealing with employer obligations often turn to Administaff for help. As the nation's leading Professional Employer Organization (PEO), Administaff serves as a full-service human resources department for small and medium-sized businesses throughout the United States.
Administaff uses Information Builders' WebFOCUS business intelligence environment to give client owners secure access to personnel-related reports on payroll, employee benefits, and other types of human resources information. In addition, a worksite employee at a customer location can view his or her pay stubs and pay history with a few mouse clicks.
"We provide a wide range of information to our clients," explains John Sheridan, applications manager at Administaff. "WebFOCUS allows us to create a reporting system that expands the functionality for users.
"As the Internet gained momentum, we started looking for a way to deploy information to our clients via the World Wide Web," recalls Sheridan. "We also wanted to add business intelligence technology to our existing systems and develop a Web-based reporting environment. The driving motivation was to put more power in the hands of clients so they could help themselves to the information they need."
The Selection Process
To fulfill its information-access requirements, Administaff looked at multiple Web-based enterprise reporting solutions and decided to standardize on Information Builders' WebFOCUS business intelligence solution.
"WebFOCUS provides a flexible reporting environment with broad data-access capabilities and strong security," recalls Dennis Cooper, director of business systems at Administaff. "It was also easy to integrate with third-party systems such as our existing security tables and batch scheduler."
WebFOCUS uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to support single sign-on, simplifying user authorization among multiple systems. "We can pull in security tables from other sources, as well as take advantage of database-level and OS-level security functions," adds Cooper. "This gives us lots of flexibility for authorizing users and protecting sensitive data."
Administaff used Information Builders Professional Services to assist with the WebFOCUS enterprise implementation and conduct training for IT staff members and key corporate users. Then, over the course of the next several months, developers created about 30 standard reports for clients to access via the Web, many of which are customizable to allow for parameter input.
Information Online
Today, WebFOCUS manages Administaff's reporting environment through a single facility. Predefined menus and routines give client-users everything they need to produce consistent, accurate, and secure reports via the Web.
Client companies or authorized representatives of the client companies use WebFOCUS to access the Administaff Information Management System, a repository of data on employees, payroll, 401(k), employee benefits, and other types of human resources information. In addition, a worksite employee at a customer location can view his or her pay stubs and pay history. "It is a very logical reporting environment that gives our clients a variety of report creations, presentations, and output options," says Sheridan. "Besides creating textual and graphic reports, they can generate PDFs and Excel spreadsheets."
Administaff currently supports thousands of client companies and tens of thousands of worksite employees. "Using a product like WebFOCUS to deliver increased reporting capabilities to our clients and standardized reporting to our in-house staff allows our professional staff to focus on the more high-tech aspects of our business," says David Dickson, Administaff's vice president of technology solutions and chief technology officer.
According to Dickson, there are three major categories of internal users: casual users who select menu-driven reports from Web-based menus and forms; more sophisticated users who create their own reports; and analysts or power users who drill down into the Informix data to do online analytical processing (OLAP).
"Most of our employees don't need extensive training in WebFOCUS," Dickson says. "As long as they can use a Web browser, WebFOCUS is an intuitive environment that is straightforward to learn and use."
Power users can develop reports on the desktop with enhanced tools such as WebFOCUS Developer Studio, an integrated development environment for building business intelligence applications featuring drag-and-drop WYSIWYG development.
"Our new reports have more fields, as well as more options for clients to create personal reporting pages and preferences," Sheridan says. "Our goal is to enhance client service; WebFOCUS makes that easy to do. It gives users the flexibility to create the types of reports they need and present the data in a meaningful way."
Info On the Go
Now that Administaff has become familiar with WebFOCUS, Dickson and his team are developing new strategies for accessing and delivering information. For example, Administaff plans to introduce more internal users to the power and convenience of self-service reporting. At the same time, IT pros are extracting information into data marts designed for different constituencies. "By staging information into data marts, we can create targeted data sets for additional analysis and reporting that are targeted at specific business domains," says Sheridan.
Administaff also is experimenting with the mobile-computing capabilities of WebFOCUS, both to push critical information to wireless devices and to pull information from production information systems via e-mail. The capabilities for accessing and analyzing information are vast, serving to boost the productivity of internal staff members while increasing client satisfaction.
"We have been very satisfied with WebFOCUS," Sheridan concludes. "The Information Builders team has been very helpful and attentive, both before and after the sale. It's clear they are very interested in our success. All in all, Information Builders is one of the best technology vendors we have worked with."
