Omni Reports

Omni Reports is an archival and distribution software aimed at large organizations like Banks, Financial Institutions, Credit Card and Telecom companies that handle huge volumes of data for generating reports and bills. 

The software takes pre-generated reports in ASCII format (.txt, spool, .prn files) as input from an existing system, say a bank’s EDP. Each field from the report is then defined in Omni Reports using the ‘Definition’ module. Through this module, the software creates its own classification of various reports required by a system. The advantage of the approach is that once the type of the report generated is identified correctly and defined here, desired formats can be saved related to them and Omni Reports can generate reports over and over again for such a format. This involves creating a report group, for instance, in any bank, the various report groups can be Account, Marketing, and Finance. Then each group is further broken down into report types (for example, General Ledger, Sales Ledger, in Accounts), then the group formats are created, as which fields will serve as what type of identifier. So, you can define Account No. as a ‘legend’ field, signifying that the reports will be grouped according to this field, among others, like say Account Name. Next you need to specify detail formats, as in identify different items from the details of the report, like the debit, credit amounts as number, and month as character. 

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Price : Base product (Rs 500,000), OmniReports Client Web/LAN/Both (price per user license: Rs 20,000), OmniReports Report Designer (per server: Rs 1,00,000), IVR Integration (Rs 1,00,000), Mail/Fax Integration (Rs 1,00,000),  OmniReports CD Viewer (unlimited licenses: Rs 5,00,000),  IBM AS 400 Integration Bridge (Rs 1,00,000) Key Specs : Report Archival and distribution Pros : Can handle large volumes of data Cons : Requires training to use Contact : Newgen Software Technologies, New Delhi Tel : 26815467-71 E-mail : jsingh@newgen.co.in

The next step is indexing the report. This means that it picks up the format of the report and transfers the actual report data to put it into the Omni Reports system. Omni Reports stores all reports as compressed and indexed files with compression levels of up to 90%, which depends upon the type of data. The user can design the report using the Omni Reports Designer to give it the desired look and feel. Now the report is ready for printing, mailing, scanning, and distribution over the intranet or the company’s WAN. 

For distribution over the network, an application server can be run as the Omni Report Server and the reports can then be accessed through the client utility. For the Web interface, the vendor recommends using IIS server 4.0. There are other features like the IVR utility (which takes inputs from an IVR system and responds to that by pulling out a report from the archive, hence converting it into a TIFF file and faxing it), the CD utility (that creates a CD with an executable report, that don’t require a viewer) and the Database Distributor (to store a large database on multiple disks). Each of these utilities are available at an additional cost. 

The software requires training and understanding of the basic design to use. Its efficacy lies on the correct setup of large volume-bound corporations for which you will need assistance from the vendors to start out. Given the price, it’s a worthy buy only if your organization depends extensively on report archival and does not suitably handle it now. 

Shruti Pareek