</section>
<section>
<title>Case Studies</title>
+ <section><title>Sunshine Systems</title>
+ <p>
+ <link href="http://www.sunshinesys.com">Sunshine Systems</link> deveveloped a
+ POI based reporting solution for a price optimization software package which
+ is used by major retail chains.
+ </p>
+ <p>The solution allowed the retailer's merchandise planners and managers to request a
+ markdown decision support reports and price change reports using a standard browser
+ The users could specify report type, report options, as well as company,
+division,
+ and department filter criteria. Report generation took place in the
+multi-threaded
+ application server and was capable of supporting many simultaneous report requests.
+ </p>
+ <p>The reporting application collected business information from the price
+optimization
+ application's Oracle database. The data was aggregated and summarized
+ based upon the
+ specific report type and filter criteria requested by the user. The
+final report was
+ rendered as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using the POI HSSF API and
+ was stored on
+ the report database server for that specific user as a BLOB. Reports
+ could be
+ seamlessly and easily viewed using the same browser.
+ </p>
+ <p>The retailers liked the solution because they had instantaneous access
+ to critical
+ business data through an extremely easy to use browser interface. They
+ did not need
+ to train the broader user community on all the complexities of the optimization
+ application. Furthermore, the reports were generated in an Excel spreadsheet
+format,
+ which everyone was familiar with and which also allowed further data
+ analysis using
+ standard Excel features.
+ </p>
+ <p>Rob Stevenson (rstevenson at sunshinesys dot com)
+ </p>
+ </section>
<section>
<title>Bank of Lithuania</title>
<p>