Customer Profile: Our customer is headquartered in Santa Barbara and is world's leading supplier of engineered products that are used in host of applications such as liquid/solid separation, liquid/liquid separation, bioreactor support etc. The customer operate a global network of 24 production facilities. They also have completed an ambitious project of converting their ERP from Open VMS to Oracle 8i database running on Sun Solaris platform. The ERP was re-written in Oracle forms and reports.

Challenge: There were about 15 users from sales who require up-to-date information for better decision-making and respond to market situations. Earlier, the information was retrieved from the Oracle-based ERP system into a MS Access database. The reports were manually generated and emailed periodically to all users. This process involved a lot of time and effort. There were very limited analysis capabilities in the existing process; hence users were expected to analyze data on their own privileges.

Solution: PK4 developed a web-based portal for accessing sales reports by business users using the zeroCode framework. The site and content was secured using database authentication. As it is very easy to implement the security using zeroCode, the data level security was also implemented where by users could be limited to only certain territories or all, the data would be filtered accordingly. The key feature of the portal was the rich functionality for querying and analyzing data. Users could define exact parameters for each report or apply different criteria as filters, ability to sort on columns and also the ability to drill down in to details from summary level report.

All reports could be viewed and downloaded in HTML, PDF and MS Excel formats. The portal was able to provide access to information to any authenticated user as per their privileges. The system admin could easily administer the user rights and privileges.

Benefits:
 Customer could generate reports in various formats like PDF, HTML.
 Customer could subscribe to a particular report with the format specification, and it got mailed to
   him automatically.