You’ve heard the saying, “the sky is the limit.” This saying is tailor-made to what I want to talk about today. When prospective clients ask about our risk management software, I always point out that CIP Reporting will bend around your existing processes rather than make you conform to some process dreamed up by someone not even in their business.
I also stress that CIP Reporting can integrate with just about any external system, such as badging systems, HR databases, and so many more. Astute people will often then ask me, “How can CIP Reporting be so flexible and customizable without changing our core software?”
With each new customer, there is a constant stream of nuanced requirements that demands our software perform tasks and manage data in a modified and unique way. Please don’t misunderstand me; out of the box, CIP Reporting will support most basic-to-moderate documentation, logging, and reporting needs without any customization at all.
What sets us apart is what we like to call the “magic sauce.” This magic sauce allows us to tailor CIP Reporting to nearly any set of requirements. I’ll give you an example. One of our customers, a trucking company, has 5,000+ active employees at any moment. They needed to have nearly their entire employee database synchronized with CIP Reporting so that when reports had to be written—which often involved input from multiple employees—all current and comprehensive information is instantaneously and electronically available for insertion into the report. We solved this and many other problems using CIP Script (CIPS), that’s core to our CIP Reporting framework.
What is CIPS? Technically it’s a built-in programming language that interfaces with the CIP Reporting engine. It enables us to do things like write and modify reports, person data, and other data. It can connect to external databases, read and write Excel spreadsheets, send and receive emails (including emails with attachments), send and receive SMS messages, make custom workflow decisions, interact with users, and so much more.
A great yet simple example of CIPS is where one customer, a property management company with about 180 properties, had us synchronize their property, tenant, floor and suite, and common location lists with CIP Reporting each day—data that originated in multiple systems. With a short CIPS script, we were able to retrieve that data from various external systems, aggregate it, and intuitively present it when their team needed to write incident reports.
Another great example of what CIPS can do involves a casino that uses CIP Reporting for its Lost-and-Found (L&F) system, among other things. They called us a few weeks ago because all of the pictures of items in their L&F system were taking up a massive amount of disk space. A day later, we had crafted a small CIPS program that runs on a weekly schedule that removes attached pictures and media from any L&F report that’s been closed for more than 90 days—problem solved.
The bottom line is that CIP Reporting can flex and grow with your requirements. It’s an excellent reporting and documentation engine backed by a group of people with a fanatical approach to support and customer happiness. Add the flexibility of CIPS, and you have a reporting and risk management system that can do things you could only imagine possible before. I dare ask if the sky is really the limit. Maybe it’s not.
Larry Wimble
VP of Engineering