LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ:BIRT), The people behind BIRT® and the leading open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor, today recognized two public service organizations in the UK - Essex County Fire & Rescue Service and NHS South of Tyne and Wear - with BIRT Excellence Awards, for the powerful results delivered by their BIRT-based performance management applications. Both won their awards in the Scorecard Excellence category.
In Essex, the county fire and rescue service has enabled tangible service improvements at a time when UK public services are under grave financial pressure, needing to deliver more for less. Previously, more effort had been expended on gathering data than on interpreting it to improve performance. The Fire & Rescue Service has developed a powerful Scorecard application using BIRT, plus a series of customised reporting and performance dashboards. These deliver relevant, up-to-date performance information to operational officers against metrics including incident numbers, turnout times and service availability. Managers can then drill through to the detailed underlying data as required.
“As a result of using BIRT, we now have ready, at-a-glance access to key performance data, which is produced much more efficiently and is of a higher quality,” comments Ben Pilkington, Information Manager, Performance Manager & Improvement at Essex County Fire & Rescue Service. End-of-month reports are now available within 10 days of the period end – a significant improvement on the six-week delay incurred previously.
In the health sector, NHS South of Tyne and Wear (NHS SoTW) has drawn on BIRT to consolidate and gain control over the 300+ diverse performance indicators it has responsibility for monitoring, ranging from contract performance of hospitals to those determining how well the PCT is undertaking core functions.
Using BIRT Scorecard NHS SoTW has developed a performance assessment framework (PAF), giving key managers easy access to detailed information at a corporate and individual contract level without the need to slice and dice numerous spreadsheets and other data sources, and created a single repository for all KPIs. Because the performance team can now spend more time managing performance, it is able to be more responsive to queries from NHS bodies and ensure that the organization is always aware of the current pressures it is facing. “The NHS is continually changing and the performance regime has to change with it,” Scott Watson, Head of Business Delivery: Business Information and Child Health at NHS SoTW notes.
Commenting on the announcement of this year’s UK winners Utpal Bhatt, Vice President and General Manager - Performance Management Group at Actuate, said, “By drawing on the powerful analytical and reporting capabilities of BIRT Scorecard in their performance management activities, these organizations are at the forefront of exploiting business intelligence for positive operational improvement at a time when public sector cuts have run deep yet the pressure remains to keep raising service levels.”
Winners of the BIRT Excellence awards were honoured yesterday at ActuateOne Live! in London.
Actuate – The people behind BIRT
Actuate founded and co-leads the Eclipse BIRT open source project. ActuateOne™ is a unified suite of products for rapidly developing and deploying BIRT-based custom Business Intelligence applications and information applications. Applications built with ActuateOne provide one user experience regardless of task or skill level; are supported by one server for any deployment including cloud and are built with one BIRT design that can access and integrate any data source - including high volume print streams. ActuateOne adds rich data visualizations, including interactivity, dashboards, analytics, and deployment options to web and mobile BIRT applications, helping organizations drive revenue through higher customer satisfaction and improved operational performance.
Actuate has over 4,800 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services and the public sector. Founded in 1993, Actuate is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol BIRT. For more information, visit the company's web site at www.actuate.com or visit the BIRT community at www.birt-exchange.com.
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