Microsoft SQL Server
Customer Solution Case Study
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Based in Redmond, Washington,
Microsoft is the worldwide leader in
software, services, and Internet
technologies for personal and
business computing.
Business Situation
Microsoft needed a centralized
reporting solution that would help
its North American sales and
marketing organization create
consistent reports that could easily
be rolled up for district, regional,
and corporate use.
Solution
The company deployed a Monthly
Business Review (MBR) Dashboard
based on Microsoft® SQL Server™
2000 Analysis Services, and running
on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003
Enterprise Edition.
Benefits
 Better visibility into the business
 Rapid return on investment
 Data consistency
 Ease of use
 Fast time-to-market
Sales Reporting Dashboard Gives Microsoft
a Better View of Its Business
“Reporting Services gives us the real-time
information we need to better manage our
business and to make sure the right
resources are focused in the highest value
areas—and at the right time.”
Paul Houghton, Vice President, East Region Enterprise, Microsoft
As the largest software development company in the
world, with annual revenue exceeding U.S.$34 billion,
Microsoft has efficient sales and marketing
organizations. But these organizations suffered from the
disparate and time-consuming manner in which sales
and marketing reports were assembled. Microsoft
wanted to provide a central data source for reporting
that would produce information that could easily be
rolled up with other district and regional reports to gain
a better view into the business. Blackstone & Cullen, a
Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, created a Monthly
Business Review (MBR) Dashboard using Microsoft
SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services. The solution has
brought consistency to reporting across the company,
and has greatly reduced the time that used to be spent
assembling monthly reports—providing for an estimated
ROI of just two weeks.
“Reporting Services Situation
Microsoft Corporation, the largest
provides a powerful software development company in
and easy-to-use the world, has annual revenues
exceeding U.S.$34 billion and
interface for the operations in 89 countries. It takes a
MBR Dashboard. well-coordinated sales and marketing
effort to produce such sales,
The graphics let you especially when dealing with business
check the health of customers that can have a long sales
cycle.
the business with
just a glance, while Like marketing and sales
organizations everywhere, Microsoft
the deep drill-down needed an IT solution to help it
capabilities allow monitor sales results on a district,
regional, and national level, across a
you to get more number of product groupings.
information Microsoft sales and marketing
organizations meet once a month to
whenever needed.” measure performance to plan, and to
Katherine Randolph, Project Manager, study the sales pipeline—with
prospective sales entering at one end
of the pipe, and completed sales
exiting from the other. These one-day
monthly business reviews, called
Rhythm of the Business meetings,
had proven effective in identifying the
health of the business pipeline across
product lines and geographies, and in
measuring key performance
indicators such as the velocity of the
pipeline—the time it takes for a
prospective sale to be completed.
As Microsoft looked for ways to
improve efficiencies of its sales and
marketing efforts, it identified two
problems with the existing system:
 Meeting preparation was taking too
much time, as managers spent one
to three days, and sometimes more,
downloading information from
several databases to create a
Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheet for
the meeting.
 Information consistency was a
problem because people were
creating their own data
aggregation.
“We heard from our people on the
district and regional levels that it was
taking so much time to pull the data
together for the monthly business
reviews, that they didn’t have the
time they wanted to analyze the
findings and use the findings to take
action according to the data,” says
Katherine Randolph, Project Manager
at Microsoft. “Additionally, managers
found it difficult to analyze the
findings across districts or regions
because when you have a couple of
hundred people pulling together their
own reports, they simply aren’t going
to be the same reports. People pulled
data from different databases and
created reports that, while similar,
weren’t the same and couldn’t easily
be rolled up with others.”
“We needed a business intelligence
tool,” says Thomas Koedding,
Director, East Region Business and
Marketing Operations at Microsoft.
“We needed a central source where
our people could quickly and easily
get the exact information they
needed, in a way that ensured
consistency so there would be no
doubt about the validity and
relevance of the data.”
 As the sales and marketing sales and marketing organizations at
organizations considered solutions, Microsoft to identify the types of
key criteria included: reports most commonly needed on
the district, regional, and corporate
 A central reporting tool to enable
levels. The company also worked with
consistency in reporting by
Microsoft to identify the key
aggregate and the integration of
databases that needed to be
data from disparate finance, sales,
accessed for reporting.
and marketing sources.
 Ability to identify the source of all
The solutions partner used this
data.
information to design and build the
 Ease of use to reduce the time
Monthly Business Review (MBR)
spent creating reports.
Dashboard. Like the dashboard in a
 Ability to “drill-down” from overview
car, the MBR Dashboard is designed
information to detailed data.
to provide a rich source of information
 Ability to filter easily among
at a glance—with the added ability to
different geographies, products, and
drill down from overview information
timeframes to suit the different
into detailed data, and then to drill
Dashboard - The MBR Dashboard brings needs of users across the
together data from several sources back up to high-level information. The
organization.
to provide an easy-to-use central internal application, which was
 A solution that could be completed
source of information on a district, created using the Microsoft Visual
as quickly as possible.
regional, or national level. Studio® .NET 2003 development
(Proprietary data not shown.) system, has been deployed
Solution throughout all of the Microsoft North
Blackstone & Cullen, a Microsoft Gold
American operations.
Certified Partner, worked with the

The MBR Dashboard is based on a

multi-tier architecture, co-hosted on a
single-processor Intel-based computer
running Microsoft
SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition
and the Microsoft Windows Server™
2003 Enterprise Edition. Both the
Windows Server 2003 operating
system and SQL Server 2000 are part
of Microsoft Windows Server System™
integrated server software.

The solution also uses the SQL Server

Integration Services (SSIS) feature
from the beta edition of SQL Server
2005, the next-generation data
management and analysis
environment from Microsoft. SSIS
replaces SQL Server 2000 Data
Transformation Services (DTS) for
performing extract, transform, and
load (ETL) processes.
The MBR Dashboard helps managers
to pull relevant data together from
disparate sources into actionable,
flexible views with deep drill-down
capability.”

The tiers include: Benefits

Microsoft has enjoyed a number of
 Reporting Tier. The MBR
benefits since deployment of its MBR
Dashboard, based on SQL Server
Dashboard, including better visibility
2000 Reporting Services and
into the business, rapid return on
supported by Internet Information
investment (ROI), data consistency,
Services (IIS) version 6.0, provides
ease of use, and fast time-to-market.
the central source for all reporting.
Visual Studio software was used to
Better Visibility into the Business
design the reports.
 ETL Tier. Information is imported
into the MBR Dashboard database
from a number of Microsoft data
stores, using SSIS to perform ETL
processes.
 Data Tier. Information is stored in
a relational database running on a
single instance of SQL Server 2000.
Plans call for the database to be
upgraded to the beta edition of SQL
Server 2005.
 Analytics Tier. Analytics is
currently performed using Transact
SQL (T-SQL) stored procedures.
Blackstone & Cullen is in the
process of upgrading the solution to
use SQL Server 2000 Analysis
Services, the online analytical
processing (OLAP) component in
SQL Server.

“We used SQL Server and Reporting

Services to build an aggregation
engine,” says Lee Blackstone,
President of Blackstone & Cullen.
“We’ve aggregated information from
about a dozen major Microsoft data
stores, including Seibel and MS Sales.

Drill Down - The MBR Dashboard
provides a wealth of data that helps
users gauge the health of the
business with just a glance, while
supporting drill-down details.
(Proprietary data not shown.)
The MBR Dashboard has given
Microsoft exactly what it needed—
better visibility into its business.
“Reporting Services provides a
powerful and easy-to-use interface for
the MBR Dashboard,” says Randolph.
“The graphics let you check the
health of the business with just a
glance, while the deep drill-down
capabilities allow you to get more
information whenever needed.”
The MBR Dashboard makes it easy to
find exactly the information you need.
“Someone working on the regional
level could, for example, use the MBR
Dashboard to view all of the SQL
Server business currently in the
pipeline, and then drill down to look
at the figures on a district basis, or to
see specific deals in process,
including the identity of the sales
representative working with the
customer,” says Koedding. “Or, you
could look at the Enterprise
Agreement deals in process. The
value goes on and on. There are more
than 100 different dashboard displays
that you can get to by drilling down
for more data.”
The improved visibility into the
business has been appreciated at all
levels, including at corporate. “We
needed to have a clear vision of the
business in Redmond, as well as in
the field,” says Randolph. “Our goal is
to be on a very predictable cycle of
reviewing business results against
goal and making course corrections.
The MBR Dashboard, by centralizing
information that used to be dispersed
across multiple data sources, is
helping all of us stay on course. It is
very powerful to be able to look at
your pipeline health and quickly see
where deals have been stalled. It
gives our people in the field the
chance to jump in and change things.
The MBR Dashboard is providing rich
insights across the business.”
The solution is also providing near
real-time data that is refreshed on a
daily basis, compared to the reports
that used to be pulled together on a
monthly basis. “The MBR Dashboard
is a great piece of work,” says Paul
Houghton, Vice President, East Region
Enterprise at Microsoft. “Reporting
Services gives us the real-time
information we need to better
manage our business and to make
sure the right resources are focused
in the highest value areas—and at the
right time.”

Summary View - The MBR Dashboard
provides the data needed to move
business forward. (Proprietary data
not shown.)
Rapid ROI
The MBR Dashboard provided
Microsoft with an extremely rapid ROI.
The project team calculates an ROI of
less than two weeks. The ROI figures
are based on:
 Average time spent downloading
data: reduced from 20 minutes to
10 seconds
 Average time returned back to each
user: 2.33 hours per month (The
team says this is a conservative
figure, as many would spend a day
or more each month assembling
their reports.)
 Average loaded cost of an
employee: U.S.$100 per hour
 Number of potential users in
Microsoft North American
operations: 6,000
 Value of recovered employee time:
$16.8 million
 Available incremental revenue
based on $471,000 per employee
multiplied by a 24.5 percent
operating income:
$9.66 million benefit
 Investment in the MBR Dashboard
to date: $400,000
 ROI break even: Less than 2 weeks
The actual benefit is likely much
higher, as these figures only look at
time spent downloading information.
It doesn’t cover the time that used to
be spent assembling custom reports
and scorecards, and trying to
integrate disparate reports from
different individuals, districts, and
regions. The problem was further
complicated because, within a district,
an account team might have one set
of figures, and the marketing team
another.
“We are all gaining productivity with
this solution,” says Koedding. “Using
the Reporting Services data from the
MBR Dashboard, everyone can be far
more action oriented.”
Data Consistency
The MBR Dashboard provides data
consistency, which is a major benefit
across the organization. “A manager
who works with seven different
districts now knows that when he gets
the information it will be in the same
format and using the same data
sources,” says Koedding. “The MBR
Dashboard relieves the inefficiencies
that used to result from a manager
trying to pull consistent information
from a set of reports that may have
been drawn from different sources
and created in different ways.”
“Using the
Reporting Services
data from the MBR
Dashboard,
everyone can be far
more action
oriented.”
Thomas Koedding, Director, East
Region Business and Marketing
Operations, Microsoft
Blackstone & Cullen designed the
solution so that whenever the mouse
hovers over a particular cell on the
MBR Dashboard, a text box pops up to
describe the exact source of the data.
“We used Microsoft [Office] Live
Meeting to gather managers from
around the country to get consensus
on what sources should be used for
each report,” says Blackstone.
“Reporting Services has brought
clarity and consistency to the
reporting. Everyone knows what the
numbers mean, and this wasn’t
always the case.”
Ease of Use
SQL Server Reporting Services was a
key element in creating the easy-to-
use MBR Dashboard. “Reporting
Services is great to work with because
it can display tables, charts, and
filters all on the same page,” says
Cathy Johnson, Practice Manager for
Business Intelligence at Blackstone &
Cullen. “Reporting Services also
makes it simple to link from the
dashboard to Web sites or other
pages in Reporting Services that
you’ve created. From one spot you
can go or do just about anything.”
Reporting Services also makes it easy
to print or export reports to a range of
formats, including HTML, Excel, and
Adobe PDF.
“We are getting tremendous feedback
from users in the field,” says
Randolph. “The MBR Dashboard, in
many cases, is saving a dozen hours a
month per person. I’ve had people tell
me: ‘You’ve made my life easier.’
We’ve even incorporated a green,
yellow, red color coding, so people
can immediately see where attention
is needed. Green numbers are like a
green traffic light, all systems are go.
When you see metrics coded in yellow
or red, it is like they are flagged for
your attention. And because you can
drill down into the numbers, it is easy
to investigate to see what actions
might get things back on course.”
Fast Time-to-Market
Blackstone & Cullen credits Reporting
Services with the rapid delivery time
the company was able to provide.
“We built the first phase of the project
in three months using a single
developer and a half-time project
manager,” says Blackstone. “Working
with Reporting Services and Visual
Studio .NET 2003, development went
swiftly. Everything just works
together. This made our customer
happy, because when Microsoft asked
us to create the MBR Dashboard, they
had already determined that they
really needed it. They weren’t looking
at the calendar. They were looking at
their watch.”
For More Information
For more information about
Microsoft products and services, call
the Microsoft Sales Information
Center at (800) 426-9400. In
Canada, call the Microsoft Canada
Information Centre at (877) 568-
2495. Customers who are deaf or
hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft
text telephone (TTY/TDD) services
at (800) 892-5234 in the United
States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide
Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about
Blackstone & Cullen products and
services, call (770) 612-1550 or visit
the Web site at: www.bac-atl.com
© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Excel, Visual
Studio, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and
Windows Server System are either registered
trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in
the United States and/or other countries. All other
trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Document published July 2005
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System
integrated server infrastructure
software is designed to support end-
to-end solutions built on Windows
Server 2003. It creates an
infrastructure based on integrated
innovation, Microsoft’s holistic
approach to building products and
solutions that are intrinsically
designed to work together and
interact seamlessly with other data
and applications across your IT
environment. This helps you reduce
the costs of ongoing operations,
deliver a more secure and reliable IT
infrastructure, and drive valuable new
capabilities for the future growth of
your business.
For more information about Windows
Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/‌windowsserversys
‌
tem
Software and Services − Microsoft SQL Server 2000
 Windows Server System Analysis Services
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 − Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Enterprise Edition Reporting Services
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Enterprise Edition Hardware
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005 beta  Intel-based server
edition
 Microsoft Office System Partners
− Microsoft Office Live Meeting  Blackstone & Cullen
 Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
 Technologies
− Internet Information Services
version 6.0