SaaS Solution Provider Leverages Open Source Business Intelligence to Reshape Service Management

Privately held Yarris Pty. Ltd., based in Melbourne, Australia, provides fully hosted, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions that help organizations manage large-scale services critical to their operations. Employing a unique solution suite and platform, the company serves industries requiring efficient management of large numbers of discrete units of work. Through its highly configurable SaaS platform, Yarris helps government agencies, utility operators, insurance carriers and a range of other organization types to optimize the time, cost and quality aspects of contractor and internal service provider performance—achieving measurably improved business results at levels not previously possible. Yarris's solutions are designed to help organizations manage a large pool of disparate service providers, which is critical to business success. The company supports a huge user community, including more than 20,000 service providers in addition to managers, executives, analysts, and others within Yarris’s client organizations. Each year, approximately 700,000 service units pass through the system, representing about $1.5 billion in value to Yarris’s clients.

For many organizations, managing a large pool of disparate service providers is critical to business success. From auto insurers with millions of claims to process to telecom utilities with thousands of pieces of equipment to maintain, these organizations face a common set of challenges: to ensure large numbers of tasks are performed properly, in a timely and cost-effective manner. Most such operations generate--and depend on--large amounts of transactional data, centered on work orders, service orders or some logical equivalent. This data must often be shared among organizationally and (frequently) geographically separate entities. Processing auto insurance claims, for example, involves data shared among claims adjusters, repair shops, dismantlers and others; and even some of these parties may outsource some of their involvement—and the data sharing requirement along with it—to additional entities. This large and growing need for information sharing—led Yarris to pursue a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture as it developed a sophisticated solution for managing—and optimizing—these kinds of services. Unlike many SaaS-based solutions, however, the Yarris application must accommodate large transaction and user loads. “Our solution is truly enterprise scale, and has to be highly configurable,” says Jeremy Forrester, the company’s CIO. “Some organizations use it to manage legal services, while a utility manages activities like digging trenches.” These companies must measure and track services delivery in different ways, with different workflows, and measure them against different kinds of performance goals, key performance indicators and service level agreements.

Yarris's choice of BI solution was influenced largely by its own technology architecture. Most of the Yarris technology consists of custom-built Java applications operating in a J2EE environment, so an open standards-based, all-Java BI solution made sense. To keep costs low and stay focused on its core expertise, the Yarris team chose the open source JasperReports library, using it to generate the wide range of reports its clients required. As Yarris’s client base grew, and as their needs became more sophisticated, a large number of reports had to be developed and maintained by the Yarris team. It was time to add to the solution’s BI capabilities—so that Yarris could give its clients the means to define and change reports, as well as schedule them. The team didn’t have to look far. With the availability of JasperServer Professional, Yarris would be able to add complete report serving capabilities to its solution—in addition to ad hoc query and in-memory analytics functions—while retaining the open source advantages of low costs and a large, supportive community. To enable high-performance, complex reporting without affecting performance of the transaction system, Yarris built a separate, Oracle-based data warehouse environment and schema for use with JasperServer. The warehouse is refreshed at varying frequencies depending on the nature of the data: for example, service order data, which grows and changes constantly, is refreshed every 15 minutes, while more static performance target data such as KPIs and SLAs might be refreshed once every night, or even weekly. Yarris clients access between 15 and 30 standardized reports in order to track and manage services, and handle scheduling on their own. Many clients also opt for JasperServer’s ad hoc query, and have created hundreds of additional reports in various forms, both scheduled and on-demand.

• Adding JasperServer Professional to the Yarris Services Management solution has freed up the internal Yarris technology team – as well as the application’s data.
• Yarris clients have ultimate control over what their reports contain, when they run, and who has access to them—all with no need for the Yarris support team to be involved.
• The improved reporting has important benefits for Yarris, whose clients, forced to deal with a large number of different service providers, come to them in search of transparency.
• By offering immediate data access, and the ability to run reports at will, and define new ones, some graphically rich—and all without Yarris's help—Yarris's solution delivers much more value to its clients.
• Some of the most gratifying feedback has come from clients using JasperServer’s ad hoc query features.

• The solution supports more than 20,000 service providers.
• Approximately 700,000 service units pass through the system each year.
• The system represents about $1.5 billion in value to Yarris’s clients.