Method and system for processing business intelligence

#1. Field of the Invention

#The present invention is related to improvements in business methodology, electronic communication and data processing metric capture where one or more events are initiated using software on a computer work station or other data capture system and subsequently stored for record-keeping, project collaboration and subsequent data analysis purposes. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and systems for monitoring and automatically recording historic data regarding significant events, automatically generating electronic messages (such as an e-mail) encapsulating details of the event (including relevant contextual information), transmitting the message (or e-mail) through a store-and-forward messaging system to a email gateway service where the event is recognized and intelligently transfers the information to a relational database for subsequent use and analysis, for example, by intelligently updating or inserting the details in a relational database. Information from the relational database can then be analyzed or otherwise processed using conventional business intelligence tools for analyzing the data, included but not limited to presenting summarized information to web portals or digital dashboards.

#2. Background Art

#Having thus described some objects and advantages of the present invention, the present invention of an improved event information capture and analysis system and method is described in connection with the accompanying drawings in which:

#FIG. 1 is a pictorial overview of a data processing system, which uses the present invention;

#FIG. 2 is a flow chart illustrating in general the logic of the present invention;

#In the following description of the preferred embodiments, the best implementations of practicing the invention presently known to the inventor will be described with some particularity. However, while this description is intended as a broad, general teaching of the concepts of the present invention using several specific embodiments, it is not intended to be limiting the present invention to the implementation as shown in any of these embodiments, especially since those skilled in the relevant art will recognize many variations and changes to the specific techniques and methods of operation shown and described with respect to these figures. Also, the present invention will be discussed in terms of a remote data storage system using electronic communication (such as, but not limited to email) over a data transmission network. The gateway described herein will be discussed in terms of two illustrative applications, although other applications are certainly feasible using the system and methods of the present invention and intended to be covered by this patent.

#FIG. 1 illustrates generally a data generation and collection system of the present invention. As shown in this FIG. 1, a first workstation 10 and a second workstation 12 are each connected to a data transmission network 20 for communicating e-mail to the data transmission network 20. Also connected to the data transmission network 20 is a server 30 for receiving and processing e-mail and database inquiries. Associated with the server 30 is a data storage device 40, which includes a relational database for storage of event data in the relational database. A gateway service as described in connection with FIG. 9 is associated with the server 30 for extracting event data from the e-mail and for transacting the inclusion of such data appropriately in the relational database.

#FIG. 2 shows a block diagram of a process for processing event data using the present invention. The process starts at block 110 with the input of information from a process that generates the information, be it a time-keeping application where a time record is generated or an inspection report for a quality monitoring application or a report for workflow monitoring application.