Gondwand Soft

Gondwana Soft slashes costs and reporting time with Caché-based OLAP

Gondwana Soft, a local software development and consulting company, has developed and deployed its reporting application specifically aimed at the pharmaceutical industry at a number of sites. Based on Caché, InterSystems' post-relational database, the new application has been designed to better manage the costs and reduce the time taken to generate reports for sales staff.

The new application slots into a pharmaceutical company's management information system (MIS) in place of its conventional OLAP (online analytical processing) reporting tool. The application sources and analyses data, generating an orders received report detailing what purchases have been made. The pharmaceutical company's sales staff can then reference these reports while visiting customers.

Danie du Toit, managing member of Gondwana Soft, says using the original OLAP reporting tool became a nightmare because of the increasing number of requests for reports by the sales teams and the increased volume of data that had to be analysed.
"The OLAP system was quite capable of handling the task of creating reports, but it was slow and expensive," says Du Toit. "Additionally, the company was also looking for a solution that would permit it to make reports seamlessly available via the Internet in future. The analytical application could not provide this functionality."
The development process took just three weeks because the Gondwana developers already knew the specifications of the OLAP reporting system, and Caché eased the task of writing and getting the program up and running.

Caché also simplifies the task of accessing and querying the data. "Caché really accelerated the process of report generation," Du Toit states. "Traditionally it could take as long as two minutes to generate a report requested by branch offices. Now it takes less than two seconds." Costs have been reduced because the pharmaceutical company can now cut down on expensive OLAP software licences bought simply to support the running of reports. A costly investment has now been replaced by a more affordable yet faster option, accessing the same data via Caché.
Caché is a powerful, scalable database, proven to be many times faster than others commercially available. It runs on a much reduced hardware footprint and is ideal for companies where low maintenance and limited database administration are key requirements.

"The initial reasons why we decided on Caché was simply its speed, versatility and low cost of ownership," explains Du Toit. "In the process of developing the application we experienced superb support and service from InterSystems SA. They are far more involved and supportive than one normally expects from a vendor.

"Caché has lived up to its reputation of reliability and ease of use," concludes Du Toit. "Reports are now generated at a fraction of the cost and time. Easier access to information makes staff more productive and able to serve customers more effectively."  Caché uniquely offers three integrated data access options which can be used simultaneously on the same data: a robust object database, high-performance SQL, and rich multidimensional access. No mapping is required between object, relational and multidimensional views of data, resulting in huge savings in development and processing time.