The Marketing Reporting Tool is a reporting application that provides sales information through the use of six standard reports as well as ad hoc reports created by the end user.
Each report can be further customized to show specific products and customers.
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The Marketing Reporting Tool (MRT) is a reporting application that will provide crucial information for any sales group. The application should be used to anlyze sales trends, identify opportunities, investigate shortcomings and reward superior performance.
A series of six standard reports are proided that allow the user to see how sales are perfoming in a variety of different formats. The user can also create custom reports to capture additional information so that sales trends may be fully investigated.
If information about a particular product, group of products, customer or group of customers is desired, the information can be filtered so that all of the reports, standard and custom, will reflect only this specific information.
MRT provides the capability to not just see data, but to work with it. This ability will give your sales team the information they need to succeed.
The navigation bar on the left side of the screen lists the different options that can be performed.
There are six standard reports that are listed in the Marketing Reports section. By clicking on one of these options, the report and supporting graph will be displyed.
The Custom Reports section contains options for viewing user created reports and customizing existing reports. New Report is a utility for creating a new, user defined report. Run/Delete Report presents a list of existing user defined reports that can be run or deleted.
Filter Reports contains functionality for filtering the report to show information for specifc products and/or customers. New Filter can be used to create a new selection of particular products and/or Customers. The filter can be reset to show all products and customers by choosing Reset Filter.
At the bottom of the navigation bar, Home Page will return the application to the home page of the application and Help will access the help file.
The Ranking Report displays customers ranked in order of highest
percent increase over prior year. The report lists customers by name along with their
current year-to-date sales, last year-to-date sales, and percent difference between the
current and prior year-to-date sales. The Ranking Report is accompanied with a bar chart
which displays the percent difference between current and prior year-to-date sales for
each customer. The percentages are displayed in order of highest ranking to lowest from left to right.
Trend
The purpose of the Trend Report and Graph is to identify sales trends that occur over a
specified period of time. Marketing personnel can determine whether the sales for a certain
customer or product are rising or dropping over time. They can also choose to view the
trend for the entire group of customers and/or product lines.
The Trend Report displays current year-to-date sales, last year-to-date sales, and the percent difference between the current and last year-to-date sales. These sales figures are totaled and displayed by month and year. The report is sorted by the percent difference between the current and last year-to-date sales.
A Trending Graph is displayed with the Trend Report
which reflects the percent difference between the current
and last year-to-date sales for each month. This graph is a line
graph that shows the trend in the sales percent over a period of time.
Performance to Plan
The purpose of this report is to determine how sales for a customer, group of customers,
or all customers are doing compared to planned sales.
The report focuses on the percent difference between the current year-to-date sales and
the planned year-to-date sales. The report lists customers with
their current year-to-date sales, planned year-to-date sales, and percent difference
between the current and planned year-to-date sales. The report is sorted in order of
the percent difference between the current year-to-date sales and the planned year-to-date
sales.
The Performance to Plan Report is accompanied with a bar chart which displays
the percent difference between current and planned year-to-date sales for each
customer. The percentages are displayed in order of highest plan percent to lowest
from left to right.
Regional
The Regional Report provides an overview on how the regions are doing based on the
current sales compared to last years sales. The user can drill down into a region to
determine the cause of the success or problems experienced by the region.
The report lists regions by name along with their current year-to-date sales,
last year-to-date sales, and percent difference between the current and prior
year-to-date sales. The report is sorted by the percent difference in sales
between current and prior year-to-date.
Gap Annalysis
The Gap Analysis Report provides the marketing personnel an opportunity
to discover gaps in their sales matrix. The sales matrix consists of a
cross-sectional sales dollar listing of customers by product groups.
The marketing personnel could identify customers that are low in sales
for a certain product group.
This report lists the sales for each customer under each product group.
Lead Sources
The Lead Sources Report is useful in identifying which sources are generating
the most revenue.
This report lists each source along with the number of leads the
source generated, the planned year-to-date revenue from the source, and the
actual year-to-date revenue generated by the source. The report also includes
the percentage of total leads, the percentage of planned year-to-date revenue,
and the percentage of actual year-to-date revenue for the source in comparison
to the other sources.
A bar chart is included with the Lead Sources Report to display both the percentage of planned year-to-date revenue and the percentage of actual year-to-date revenue for each source. This gives a visual comparison for each source of planned versus actual revenue generated, as well as the same comparison between the different sources.
Note: The sort column does not have to be selected as a column that will appear on the report.
The user can click on the Save and Run button to save the report specifications for future loads, and display the report on the screen.
A query is built from the user selections for the custom report.
Once the user saves and runs the report, the query is saved in the
database for future reference. The query is then loaded from the database,
executed, and the results displayed in a neatly formatted report.
Run/Delete Report
The Run/Delete Report option is available for running or deleting reports
that were created previously through the New Report option. To run or delete
the custom report, select the report from the list of reports and click on
either the Run or Delete button. The Run button will display the report.
The report will be displayed with the reporting options set within the Customize
Reports section. The Delete button will delete the report.
The Run button loads the query associated with the selected report from the database and executes it. The report is then formatted and displayed in the appropriate frame on the screen. The Delete button removes the record from the databases that contains the report information and associated query.
The application makes extensive use of frames. This allows for the permanent navigation bar on the left side of the screen, as well as the seperate resizable frames that contain the graphs and reports.
The application would be useless without the database connection. This is accomplished through LiveWire and the use of JavaScript. Queries are sent to the database through LiveWire, and when the result set is returned, the screen is populated using the JavaScript functionality.
The graphs are created by using a Java applet called Chart.Class. The information is returned to MRT in the same way as for the reports. The difference is that the return set is passed to the Java applet. This information is then used to construct and properly scale the graph. See the source code in the Java directory to learn more about the applet.
All of the queries can be customized. This is accomplished by calling a server side JavaScript function called BuildQuery. The client object, a feature that we use extensively, holds the values for the customer and product filters that the user has currently set. In each query, the BuildQuery function will add additional where clause statements in order to produce the desired product and customer mix.
Server side JavaScript is used to create functions in many places throughout the application. Examples of this include not only the BuildQuery function, but also the NRound function that formats numbers by rounding to the specified decimal place and adding commas. Many other uses of the server side JavaScript can be found in the mrt.js file.
The construction of custom reports is also a noteworthy function of this application. The SQL string that is used to produce the report is created by reading the user input from the screen and adding SQL statements to capture each field that is requested, as well as the sort key and the sort order. Upon retrieval of the information, the application then looks at the name of the column, and formats the header and the information returned in the appropriate fashion.
The New Filter and Run/Delete Report sections of the application both use two frames to allow for the dynamic loading of a select object. By clicking on a category in a select object in the top frame, the corresponding select object in the lower frame will be updated to show the list of choices that fall in that category. This is a drill down feature.