Customer Successes:
Prologic Technology Systems
"The major advantage of JReport is the ability to share components among reports, making it easy to edit and update a large number of reports at one time." – Jeff Pepper, Product Manager Prologic Technology Systems

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Organization Overview

Austin-Texas-based Prologic Technology Systems specializes in providing education software solutions to meet the student and financial administrative needs of school districts across the country.

Prologic has established partnerships with technology leaders to offer educational software products that effectively meet school district administrative needs by providing project management, training, implementation, and technical support that ensures its solutions are well-understood and utilized to fullest capacity.

Business Challenge

Prologic collaborated with over 20 Texas school districts to develop TEAMS – Texas Education Administrative Management Solution. TEAMS is a J2EE, cross-platform application suite that integrates business and student administration modules to provide Web-based management for students and educators in the K-12 market and to enable ready compliance with Texas Education Agency (TEA) standards.

Essential to the TEAMS solution was the ability to generate standardized reports for all school districts while also tracking changes and movement of data in a fluid information environment. TEAMS needed to be able to disseminate data changes automatically throughout existing reports. For example, when a student matriculates from one grade to the next, that student's information is updated, and all applicable reports must reflect those changes, even if the actual data is moved from one table to another in the school database. Writing the code necessary to enable that capability is a formidable task that Prologic's development team wanted to avoid.

Another critical requirement for TEAMS was the ability to design custom reports to precise specifications. Hundreds of standardized reports, including human resources, financial, and student information reports needed to be integrated into TEAMS. Reports like payroll, general ledger, attendance, and health records all needed to be designed in accordance with Texas school district business rules and reporting requirements. In addition, the Texas Education Agency mandates all schools to submit their data via standardized electronic files as defined by the State's Public Education Information Management System.

Because of their diverse customer base, Prologic also needed a reporting solution that was easy to deploy in varying environments and that required minimal training, allowing reports to be quickly designed and delivered.

Rather than developing its own internal reporting tool, Prologic chose to embed a J2EE reporting application into the TEAMS architecture.

The JReport Solution

Prologic selected JReport over other vendors because JReport was the only solution that met all of Prologic's reporting requirements and allowed Prologic to customize the reporting GUI to maintain a consistent look and feel within the TEAMS application.

JReport also allowed Prologic to share resources among many reports. For example, any resource – like a parameter, formula, subreport, or summary – can be defined in JReport and stored in a shared catalog, rather than binding it to a specific report. Report developers can then re-use that resource in any report. Anytime any data associated with that shared resource is modified, changes are reflected in every instance of that resource's use.

"For us, the major advantage of JReport over other tools was the ability to propagate data changes throughout defined reports," said Jeff Pepper, Product Manager at Prologic. "This was really the deciding factor because it saved us a lot of headaches, and only JReport could do it."

Prologic's developers also found JReport's intuitive, visual report design environment to enable fast and easy report creation and template customization.

Benefits

Prologic's developers have designed over 150 standardized reports with more than 200 formulas in accordance with strict Texas Education Agency requirements. Design of the reports using JReport's drag-and-drop query builder saves developers considerable time versus manually writing report queries.

Prologic's development team has also reported saving countless hours in programming time because JReport automatically incorporates the critical data propagation capability they required. For example, the TEAMS database schemas are on a 6-week release cycle, normally with one or more schema changes in that time. The ability to migrate reports to new schemas quickly, using JReport's catalog tool, means that developers don't have to spend needless hours analyzing each report in order to identify and change queries and functions to match the new schema.

In addition to Prologic's own development team, their customers are also realizing fast return on their investment in TEAMS. Within months of embedding JReport, Prologic has contracted to provide TEAMS to school districts throughout Texas. One district realized an immediate, positive impact in streamlining their Human Resources department. This district employs over 7000 people, and turnover and growth requires over 600 new hires annually. To fill these positions, the district estimates it receives over 20,000 employment applications.

The district uses JReport's Web-based interface to search electronic applications by qualification, experience, certification, and other criteria in order to identify the top candidates for any position. Only the most qualified applications are sent electronically through JReport to the school principal, who can then print the application on a local PC and make the hiring decision.

Previously, the hiring process involved manually sifting through every resume, copying the applications of the most qualified candidates, and mailing those copies to school principals.

With TEAMS, the school district has already realized significant savings in overhead and HR employee time.

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