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Proceedings of the 9 Symposium on Applied Science, Business & Industrial Research – 2017
ISSN 2279-1558, ISBN 978-955-7442-09-9

Improving the Performance in Report Generation Process

Thenuwara DCM, Munasinghe B
Department of Computing and Information Systems, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka
hansi.thenuwara@gmail.com
ABSTRACT

Performance of report generation process is important for the business process as it
directly impacts the accuracy and efficiency of decision making process of a business.
Response time of report generation tools becomes a decisive factor in this regard. This
research was conducted with the aim of finding a feasible solution to enhance the response
time of the report generation tool called Report Manager of a software company providing
automated solutions to tour operations processing. Case company uses two in-house
developed software tools; an inventory management system and a report management tool
named Reports Manager in the process. These tools are used in automating tour operation
process and in analyzing and viewing travel data as per customers’ needs respectively. The
commercial tour operating software of the company is a repository of data recorded
regarding bookings, searches and other functions on tour operation process. Report
Manager is a web solution based on Chrystal Report used as a tool enabling users to create,
edit and generate reports from the data. Re-formatting and enhancing the filtering process
of Crystal syntaxes were effectively incorporated in improving the response time of Report
Manager in this research.

KEYWORDS: Data fetching, Efficiency, Filtering, Query enhancement, Reports generation,

1 INTRODUCTION exchanged in transactions between clients
and services and also stored in the
This research is based on a tour databases. Data stored over the years are
operation processing software developed by available in these databases. In this domain,
a case company. The main software solution Oracle database is used to store the data and
of interest is a data repository of travel they can be fetched using SQL queries.
operation process data, which uses Oracle
database to store general data. Therefore, the Crystal reports get data by sending queries
statistics tables provided by the software are to the database. They are then formatted and
not in actual representation thereby are too presented, according to the designs that are
technical to be handled by end users. previously implemented. Nevertheless, some
clients have complained that some reports
In order to analyse and view data as per exceed an acceptable time in generating
different customers’ needs, the company has when using this tool. They have also stated
developed a web solution called “Report that there are a number of low performing
Manager” where users can create, edit and reports, which give poor interpretations of
generate reports from data available from data.
the main software soultion. This tool works
similar to Jasper Reports, Crystal Reports or The issue arises when, with the large
any other report generation tool, yet in a amount of data, Report Manager takes a
user-friendlier and more precise to considerable time to generate some of the
individual customer needs. Reports Manager reports. This is a bottleneck for the analysis
currently uses Crystal Reports technology and decision making process of the client.
for report creation and Eclipse and Crystal’s Analytical data availability effects directly
Eclipse plugin for report design and to the efficiency of the business process.
development.A large amount of data Hence, this problem needed to be resolved
and the report generation speed is needed to

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