Challenge
ADT Commercial wanted to provide their National Account customers with a quarterly executive summary of security system data. These high-level customers can have hundreds of installations nationwide. The challenge was to take a massive data file containing multiple customers’ alarm activity, inspection activity, installation, service call performance and other key metrics and turn it into attractive and readable reports (with charts!) quickly. Each final 1 Report had to be in a format that could be emailed or printed.
Solution
We knew it was possible to batch-produce data driven documents, but doing so with a high standard of layout and typographic sophistication is a challenge. After exploring various workflows, we decided we could best achieve both efficient production and high finish by using standard page‑layout software with some additional applications. Our next step was to work backwards: we designed idealized layouts of data, then constructed a data template to hand off to our client’s IT staff to populate. The final data file is a massive Excel table of 1,134 columns, but in mere minutes we can import that data into our template, batch export individual files as PostScript and then render to Adobe PDF documents, which can either be emailed or printed for hand-delivery.
The 1 Report has been a mainstay of transparent communication between ADT Commercial account managers and their National Account customers since 2010. In addition to providing a complete picture of security activity, it helps identify potential problems with individual installations.