University of Winchester
MCR Systems support the award-winning university with the implementation of our Symphony Concerto Business Intelligence & Insight tool
With roots reaching as far back as 1840, the University of Winchester was established as part of the Cathedrals Group in 2005.
​
As an award-winning institution providing education in the Arts, Business, Humanities and Governance, the University of Winchester provides a unique refuge for young students, both domestic and international, assessing their place in and contribution to the world.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
MCR Systems is proud to support their work with the implementation of our Symphony Concerto Business Intelligence & Insight tool, designed to provide a three-step solution to the complex process of sending data out to other database systems; ELT: Extract - Load - Transform. MCR recognise the powerful insights that can be reached by fully understanding and analysing collected data, and Symphony Concerto is an industry-leading method of harvesting this data and using ELT methods, load data into a customer’s own data warehouses, allowing the in-house creation of powerful reporting.
​
With preparation and transfer of transaction data accompanied by preparation and transfer of referential system data posted daily to a customer hosted SFTP site, MCR Systems have developed a bespoke iteration and implementation of the Symphony Concerto system for University of Winchester, to mutual success, as demonstrated by this statement from Thomas Goold-Davies:
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
We approached MCR Systems for a Making Tax Digital solution and were impressed by the functionality and the secure delivery mechanism of Symphony Concerto, as a university we felt that the ELT solution best fitted our needs. MCR manged to deliver implementation on time to our deadline and since this implementation we have also implemented the SymPOS GO All-in-One POS and Payments solution.
The University identified a number of key objectives from both a business and project perspective: the ability to mine the existing data sets, create a secure and efficient data pipeline between POS and the Agresso finance package and to reduce operational friction and manual input.
Key Highlights:
-
Requirement: A lead requirement in the scope of work was to output a digital solution that delivers the sales information data from the POS systems, to the currently operative Agresso Finance package that meets the guidelines for the Making Tax Digital legislation.
-
Solution: Ensuring the data transmission is conducted securely and reliably to a secure client hosted environment for consumption by a 3rd Party Solution.
-
Implementation: Source data is packaged with appropriate reference information, processed within the Symphony Concerto BI solution, exported through secure channels to a similarly secure environment. Data is imported into a customer hosted database, after which point a 3rd Party extraction method collects the data and compiles an import file in the Agresso format.
-
Benefits: The current implementation is future-proof and can be utilised beyond data transfer to allow customised strategic reporting without the need for additional development time from MCR. The system also reduces operational friction and manual effort, while making historic data more accessible, even data that pre-dates the Concerto feed.
-
Outcome: The new system not only increases overall reliability, but saves time, reduces manual effort and error rates, and increases the data mining capability of the feed.
