Leightons Opticians

Bespoke Reporting and Business Intelligence

Leightons is an independent hearing and optical care company that prides itself on providing specialist care for its patients every step of their way, and throughout life, using advanced testing methods.

Leightons were in need of a reporting system that they could use to review the sales and commissions figures for individual clinics across the country on a monthly basis from the data they currently hold in their database. This requirement later expanded so that these reports needed to be automatically generated every month, for every clinic, and exported to both PDF and CSV.

Later on in the project, Leightons needed some assistance with expanding their Power BI reporting platform.

The Solution

The sales data from each of Leighton’s clinics were being managed by an audiology practice management software known as Sycle. They also already had a process in place that would import the raw sales data from Sycle into their SQL database.

As the reports were to be generated from the SQL database, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) was the platform agreed upon between Dolphin IT Solutions and Leightons. The first stage involved creating the reports within the SSRS web portal where admin users could log in and view a report for a given clinic and month.

This worked well until the need for automating the report generation came about. To deliver this, the Dolphin IT Solutions team leveraged .NET Framework to build a console app that would hook into the SSRS server and programmatically generate the reports for every branch automatically each month. The reports were generated in PDF and CSV formats – the latter of which was used as the basis for a data export into their web portal used by the clinics, where they could view their own monthly figures.

Upon successful completion of this project, Dolphin IT Solutions was then asked to help Leightons improve their internal Power BI reporting, providing separate reports from SSRS. The expert Power BI developers at Dolphin IT Solutions modified the overnight ETL to push data into a Power BI SQL Warehouse that the Power BI Gateway would feed from, providing up to date reporting dashboards within Office 365.

Some of the additional functionality needed included tachometers showing week to date figures with complex calculations, top sales figures by branch, and a performance dial comprising daily sales values with targets.