WebFOCUS and iWay Drive Dramatic Productivity Gains and Net Huge Cost Savings at State of New Mexico Department of Transportation
Snapshot
| Organization New Mexico Department of Transportation. |
| The Challenge Create and distribute a huge variety of reports to streamline budgeting, finance, HR, and other operational activities. |
| The Strategy Create a cohesive, statewide reporting environment that allows users in six districts to easily obtain information from many types of information systems, without help from the programming staff. |
| The Results More than 500 users depend on the self-service environment, saving hundreds of hours manually accessing and analyzing information. |
| Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, iWay Software, Consulting, Education. |
Known as the Land of Enchantment, New Mexico has nearly half a million miles of roads carving through its scenic plateaus, deserts, mountains, and meadows. It is the responsibility of the New Mexico Department of Transportation to build and maintain these roads. The agency has a $1 billion budget and employs hundreds of people spread over six districts throughout a wide geographic area. To track financial, budgeting, and HR activities, the state depends on technology from Information Builders to support the needs of hundreds of users.
"WebFOCUS and iWay empower our financial and account professionals to efficiently access and analyze information from multiple data sources, dramatically improving their productivity and facilitating their ad hoc and monthly reporting tasks," says Brenda Garcia, a project manager at the New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT). "The software helps us access a great deal of information via the Web, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year."
Setting a New Course
With funding coming from multiple sources and road projects involving hundreds of vendors, managing budgets and financial transactions for NMDOT is a continual challenge. In the past, financial professionals had to depend on programmers to help them access financial information. Administrators in every district compiled green-screen reports from mainframe-based information systems, and then manually consolidated the results into Microsoft Excel. According to Garcia, this process took a long time and was error prone and expensive. "It was taking administrators hundreds of hours each month to produce consolidated financial reports," she says. "Often, by the time the final reports were compiled, the information was obsolete."
In May 2002, the Department purchased WebFOCUS and iWay, and then enlisted Information Builders' Consulting to help them develop a new reporting environment.
In addition to WebFOCUS, NMDOT considered three other reporting tools: Crystal Reports, Oracle Discoverer, and Hallogram InfoMaker. However, none of these other tools possessed the requisite capabilities. For example, Crystal Reports only offered ODBC and SQL data connectivity, which excluded Adabas, VSAM, and other important data sources. Also, Crystal Reports required a persistent connection to the reporting server, which consumed excessive resources. The software ran only on a Microsoft Windows platform, and it did not provide an audit trail.
Neither Crystal Reports nor InfoMaker could automatically generate output in Excel format. Also, these tools only had rudimentary security, scheduling, and distribution capabilities. Oracle Discoverer worked fine for Oracle data, but it could not easily combine information from other data sources. Only WebFOCUS could join disparate data sources such as Adabas, Oracle, Microsoft Access, VSAM, and CICS flat files.
When it came to integration software, the State of New Mexico considered several products, but none were as open or comprehensive as the technology from iWay Software, which offers more than 280 native data, application, and technology adapters for accessing virtually any type of information. "We carefully considered our purchase of WebFOCUS and iWay," recalls Garcia.
"The decision was made based upon the requirements of the entire agency. The technology from Information Builders surpassed the capabilities of the other products we tested."
IT Tune-Up
By using WebFOCUS Managed Reporting and ReportCaster along with iWay adapters for several key legacy systems, the NMDOT automated reporting for the entire department in just a few months. They completed the job with two in-house staff members and one developer from Information Builders' Consulting. They installed WebFOCUS on a Microsoft Windows 2000 server and set up an iWay server to access real-time information from many different computing platforms. "By using iWay under the covers, WebFOCUS can successfully join data from a diverse set of computing platforms and databases," Garcia explains.
Information Builders' Consulting also helped the state create a user-friendly dashboard interface to make it easy for end users to access both standard and ad hoc reports. "We've been happy with the services right along," says Garcia, who created the vast majority of the reports the department depends on today. "The new reporting environment sits right on our intranet and does not require the installation of any client-side software. WebFOCUS only requires a browser, even for complex reporting functions, which was one of the other things that set it apart from the other reporting tools."
End users can customize their dashboards to view reports of interest, and easily share reports within their groups or domains. Each user can create a personal home page of information – much like setting up a My Yahoo! home page, but for internal information. "We associate an end user with a domain or group of users such as HR, finance, or executives," says Garcia. "They can then create additional reports and share them with colleagues, but only within that domain."
The reporting domains are easy to manage and administer, and WebFOCUS incorporates security down to the data level. "We simply authorize users, set security levels, and keep an eye on the servers," Garcia continues. "WebFOCUS pretty much takes care of itself."
Gaining Traction
Initially, Garcia taught 50 end users, five power users, and two administrators to use the system. Popularity spread quickly. "WebFOCUS is designed for end users, not just developers," she emphasizes. "It is a user-friendly environment, unlike the other tools we looked at, which require an abundance of training. Once employees discover the powerful capabilities of this information system, they are eager to learn more."
There are currently 500 WebFOCUS users throughout NMDOT, utilizing about 800 different reports. There is no need to create or maintain a data warehouse, although the department does generate "hold files" of monthly financial information. Users can access these files whenever they want, and download data to their own servers as necessary. Some reports, delivered by WebFOCUS ReportCaster, are scheduled to run on a weekly or monthly basis. "We have created a dynamic solution that can grow and evolve to meet changing business needs," says Garcia, "including standard reports that many departments utilize."
The statewide budgeting system is a prime example. Formerly, department managers created budget reports manually by reviewing hardcopy extracts and rekeying information into Microsoft Access databases. Now, they push a button and WebFOCUS generates the reports in seconds, offering options for sorting and summarizing information. According to Garcia, this new reporting infrastructure saves a tremendous amount of time, especially at the end of the year during the annual budgeting process. "It used to take seven or eight days to create a budget status report for each district," she maintains. "Now each district runs a secure, standardized report. Offhand, I'd say this one report saves us 300 hours of labor per year."
Full Speed Ahead
Garcia and her team went on to create a series of reports for the human resources department. For example, the E-1 report gives HR managers an instant snapshot of headcounts, open positions, salaries, review ratings, withholdings, benefits, and retirement information. In the past, users had to ask a programmer to set up reports from this system. Now, they can create their own per-diem, overtime, and a host of other reports, which helps them automate personnel, payroll, and time-and-attendance functions. "WebFOCUS can gather complex data from various legacy sources, allowing us to turn data into useful information and deliver it to the people who need it in the format they prefer," says Garcia. "Instead of taking weeks to compile information, WebFOCUS does it in seconds with a mouse click. We have eliminated manual data entry and reduced errors that used to occur when administrators rekeyed data."
WebFOCUS and iWay are also used to access data from the Financial Management Information System (FMIS). Managers use the self-service reporting environment to create reports pertaining to inventory, cash flow, fixed assets, equipment, AR, AP, energy usage, energy conservation, and capital assets. WebFOCUS supplies a complete auditing trail so they can quickly catch errors. "Formerly we had to manually check the auditing trail to track down erroneous entries, which could take many hours," Garcia says. "Now WebFOCUS does this automatically. It can also correctly identify sub-objects, which is very useful to our financial personnel."
Another report summarizes cash receipts and invoices, which used to be tracked manually in Excel spreadsheets. Thanks to an iWay adapter that provides direct access to MVS data on the mainframe, the information is pulled directly into a browser-based presentation. "It is not only quicker, but more accurate," Garcia notes. "Before, some receipts were entered incorrectly. For example, they might have been placed in the wrong fund or never accounted for, which meant inaccurate bank statements, showing less revenue. Now that we have a monthly report of invoices for the month, they can reconcile the receipts with the general ledger and spot any inaccurate postings."
Eye on the Horizon
Information Builders has supplied a variety of development and education services to the State of New Mexico. Its Education Department conducted a week-long training course for developers and administrators, along with an additional week's worth of training for end users. After that, Garcia devised a customized training curriculum to bring other users up to speed. "Most people learn the system fairly quickly," she says. "They are astonished at the time savings."
Government officials at the NMDOT believe Information Builders technology has the potential to simplify reporting activities for many other state agencies, just as it has done for the Department of Transportation. "The basic infrastructure we have created could be used by other departments to connect people with information," Garcia concludes. "We see great potential for centralizing WebFOCUS as a statewide standard. This would deliver a lot of savings to the New Mexico state government."
