Ad hoc queries and reports are the bane of many IT departments. The need to churn out frequent, one-off, "must have" data queries for users can be a significant drain on developers' time. Users can't be blamed for the numerous impromptu requests. Customer service, continuous improvement, and the maintenance of competitive advantage demand that business people regularly look at data in innovative...

What if you could reduce an eight-hour outage… to no time at all? That’s exactly what Peoples Telephone Cooperative did. Faced with sudden equipment failures, they started monitoring their network… then went one step further to automatically fix the outages. Now this savvy telecommunications service provider saves countless man hours, makes sure technicians get a full night’s sleep every night...

TransAlta Corporation is a multinational power generation and wholesale marketing company with yearly revenue of about $2.5 billion. Based in Canada, TransAlta manages the production and delivery of energy resources over a wide geographical expanse. This requires a sophisticated network of control systems for thousands of pumps, valves, gas turbines, high voltage breakers, and more. In the Ontario...

The Children's Museum of Science and Technology in Troy, New York was founded in 1954 and is located in the Rensselaer Technology Park. Its mission is to be the premier science center in the New York Capital Region where kids and parents can explore, discover, and imagine the world of science together.

In the quest for IT efficiency, one way to save time is to automate the daily grind of launching and monitoring ERP system utilities. Washington-based job shop Magic Metals, Inc., sought to do just that when it implemented Infor ERP VISUAL, but the company's busy IT manager did not have time to write custom scripts to enable VISUAL utilities to self-execute. Instead, he turned to the pre...

For years, an IT staffer at ITW Construction Products had to come to work early every morning to prepare the company's ERP system for the new day. At first, the process of incorporating the previous day's business activities into the ERP database took thirty minutes. As the company grew, the job ballooned to 2 ½ hours. Rather than continuing to waste valuable time repeating the same tasks day...

Louisiana Lottery Corporation was created in 1991 by the Louisiana state legislature with the idea of generating revenue without increasing taxes. Its mission is to organize, manage, and oversee the operations which support the Louisiana Lottery. Responsibilities entail all collections, accounting, auditing, reporting, and support for the thousands of retailers who sell lottery tickets for games...

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has the challenge of staffing and managing thousands of nurses busy delivering top-notch patient care. To manage this complexity, MD Anderson relies on three critical applications: a human resource system by PeopleSoft, a time and attendance system by Kronos, and a staffing system by Per-Se's ANSOS One-Staff. These three applications (with their...

Getting sophisticated signage to the store shelf requires a lot of digital heavy lifting. At Vestcom International, raw product data sent by major retailers and brand manufacturers must be scrubbed, organized, converted to PostScript files, and sorted by variables such as tag type and store location before being transmitted to 10 company production facilities around the country for printing and...