Retail Operation Builds Dashboard Application with mrc’s M-Power
June 12, 2007 Alex Woodie
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Mrc last week highlighted the success that one of its customers, Bosselman Energy of Grand Island, Nebraska, had using its M-Power development tool to build a Web-based dashboard application that accesses data from its J.D. Edwards ERP system. Bosselman Energy is a privately company that owns and operates a series of gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, motels, and truck stops across a swath of the heartland extending from Kentucky to New Mexico, in addition to other ventures. At the center of the company’s IT operations was an Oracle J.D. Edwards ERP system. But with such a dispersed operation and only 12 IT staffers, the company was having a hard time consolidating and tracking its data, especially its point of sale (POS) data, which ran separately from J.D. Edwards. “Our situation wasn’t very good,” says Harry Galbraith, Bosselman’s IT director, according to a case study published on mrc’s Web site. “We were using tools that were not enterprise-wide or enterprise-level tools, and ran on the client-side. Because our data files are large, it required extra logic to cut them up, and then we had to build separate programs to read different dimension-based facts. It was very cumbersome.” Mrc’s solution to the problem was M-Power, a cross-platform development tool that excels at building Web-based dashboard-type applications. Bosselman decided to give M-Power a shot at developing a Web-based dashboard application front-ending its datamart, which holds 15 million records and is growing at the rate of 600,000 records per month. M-Power has been a success, according to Galbraith. After learning how to use the tool and rolling out its first Web-based dashboard, Bosselman’s IT department is now able to crank out the dashboards at unprecedented rates. “After the requirements are gathered, an application is usually generated in a few hours or even minutes,” Galbraith says. “This allows users to make changes as needed, and has the added bonus of creating flexibility in the design process, providing our users with a more efficient decision tool.”
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