Periscope Developments
Periscope’s latest software version is now available. The attached document provides an overview of the new software features and some future developments.
What is Trending?
Some of Periscope’s recent client activities are briefly described below:
Periscope has been working with a number of clients to enable data from Periscope’s application to be used in Power BI for charting and reporting purposes. This includes a mixture of direct access to the database and the scheduling of reports to a designated e-mailbox. This has enabled clients to generate reports from a central data warehouse that is receiving data from across the organisation, including Periscope Software.
Periscope has been in further conversation with energy retail companies to demonstrate the integration of risk/issues, compliance and regulatory breach reporting. Of particular interest has been the use of the Print Merge function to enable the population of template spreadsheets directly from the software application to report on wrongful disconnections and other regulatory breaches.
While Periscope Software has been used for audit planning and the tracking of audit actions for many years, a number of clients have recently introduced the notion of positive feedback following an audit. This is used to recognise the positive aspects of what a business area is doing well, as often audits can be viewed as having negative connotations.
Periscope has recently presented to an existing client to expand the use of the complaints management system to include the ability for a member of the public to register complaints using Periscope’s anonymous link. The link will be located on the client organisation’s website.
Periscope’s software has been recently used by a client for an approval system for chemical and biological items used for research.
Periscope continues to work with clients to enable single sign on for their applications which increases user engagement and reduces the burden on system administrators. Single sign on ensures access to Periscope Software is controlled by the client organisation and it enables more timely removal of access for users no longer with the organisation. There are only a few clients that have not enabled single sign on for the software.
Some clients are taking advantage of new form functionality/aesthetic and going through a form refresh process to ensure an improved user experience.
Periscope has been working with a client to automate workflows and notifications for an insurance and audit action follow up system.
An existing client has made some recent updates to its water quality risk management system to capture a new function and asset type for assessment.
Periscope Case Study – Migrating 50,000 Records into Periscope
Periscope is currently working with a large client to develop a process to migrate 50,000 incident and hazard records into the system with each record containing about 25 fields meaning that approximately 1.25 million data points will be imported into Periscope’s system. Some of Periscope’s observations and recommendations in order to best manage data integrity from the old system as well as how they are brought into the new system are detailed below:
Understand the purpose of transferring data into the system. Is it for evidentiary and/or trending purposes? This will assist in deciding what data is required to be imported and what can be left behind.
Undertake an analysis of the integrity of the data being imported. If the data is not of a sufficient standard and it is required for trending purposes, consider whether there is benefit in bringing it into the system. Quite often we see data gaps that will reduce the value of any trending analysis.
Acknowledge that legacy data may reflect business processes and organisational structures that do not exist in the current system. It may be necessary to update the organisational structure and position tables within Periscope Software in order to reflect the past.
Where possible, map data to existing data fields. If this is not possible, create new fields to receive the data, so it can be retained for historical purposes.
Cleary identify the legacy data and decide who has ongoing edit/read only access to this data.
Undertake exhaustive testing before data is imported into the production database.
Always back up the database before every import.
Tips and Tricks
Widget search
Periscope’s widget search allows for granular searching of specific fields or a combination of values in specific fields. It is a quicker search compared to the dashboard search as it only returns data contained in the widget.
Report Live Links
Live links in reports enable a user to select the live link (usually the record Id) and gain direct access to the relevant record in the database subject to single sign on being available. This is useful where a user may receive a report containing many records, and only needs to update a couple of those records. It also allows a user to access more detail about the record than is contained in the report.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] or 03 9882 1896, if there are any matters you would like to discuss.
Regards Praveen