Customer Solutions - Reports

This page presents three PatternStream customers and their need to publish reports for print. 

Report Solution One

The County of Santa Clara is located at the heart of Silicon Valley and includes the cities of San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Cupertino. It is one of the largest counties in California and has expenditures of more than $2.1 billion.

Annually, the County Office of Budget and Analysis (OBA) publishes its Recommended Budget document. Previous budget documents were labor intensive and it was felt that they may not utilize the best software and processes for the job. To support their new publishing efforts, the County considered 12 different companies. They selected FML.

Working with the OBA and Rocky Bay Consulting, FML set up and published the FY 2000 Recommended Budget, and later the FY 2000 Final Budget, using the PatternStream desktop database publishing system. County financial information required for publishing was obtained directly from the County’s UNIX based Oracle database views. This allowed the most current information to be published in the budget document.

FML also worked with Program Analysts to set up and develop a large series of FrameMaker files which were used as front matter material for individual budget document sections. The FrameMaker file structure was placed in an Access database allowing the files to be published on the fly with the financial information.

As the PatternStream solution was implemented, publishing resources required for future budgets have been radically decreased. Instead of requiring outside vendor support, OBA  personnel will be able to publish budgets without additional set up or programming. In addition, the document has been converted to PDF for distribution to citizens and employees.

Report Solution Two

GE Capital Financial Assurance (GE) provides life insurance and financial services to its customers worldwide. As part of its service to its customers and to satisfy regulatory requirements, GE distributes fund performance documents (FPD) to its investors on a monthly basis. An FPD is a two page document that describes the monthly changes in a group of investment funds in a tabular format.

GE determined that to increase sales and customer support by providing fund performance information, fund performance data must be published as soon as it becomes available using an integrated database publishing system. The publishing system goals were to:

• Decrease FPD time to distribution
• Decrease personnel resource requirements for FPD creation
• Decrease FPD information maintenance and distribution costs
• Increase information quality
• Directly publish from new and existing database information
• Allow publishing to multiple medias — print, CD-ROM, and Internet/intranet 

Fund performance data becomes available at the end of every month. Before using the FrameMaker/PatternStream desktop database publishing solution, it took GE up to four weeks and multiple personnel resources from different departments to publish the FPDs.

FML is currently using the FrameMaker/PatternStream desktop database publishing system to publish GE’s fund reports monthly using the following process:

• GE provides FML the FPD database via email
• FML publishes the FPDs, saves them to PDF, and emails the PDFs for GE’s review
• Once approved, the PDFs are emailed to the printer

Using the PatternStream solution, all of the two page FPDs can be published in less than an hour. Electronic routing of the completed FPD PDF files for review and printing has also decreased process time. This has dramatically enhanced GE’s ability to quickly and cost effectively distribute FPDs.

Report Solution Three

NIMA is the federal agency in charge of providing timely, relevant, and accurate imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial information in support of national security objectives.

FML worked with its Houston-based partner Instrux to provide a database publishing solution for NIMA. Instrux is currently using the PatternStream desktop database publishing system to implement NIMA publishing projects. Initially, NIMA purchased a standard three package license set of PatternStream. After initial use and evaluation, NIMA has purchased an additional three package license set of PatternStream.