KOA's front desk reporting engine captures millions of bookings across 500+ locations with Jaspersoft®

Challenge

Kampgrounds of America, Inc. (KOA) is a franchised organization with over 500 locations, each offering family-friendly camping experiences across the United States and Canada. The company uses the same front desk software across all locations' front desk operations, including reservations, check-ins, sales, and reports.

Additionally, franchise owners and KOA corporate leaders rely on reporting for various functions. The software helps manage upcoming reservations, site allocations, broader business performances, and future booking trends.

With the technology ecosystem continuously advancing, KOA needed to modernize the reporting engine used in its proprietary front desk software. The franchisor's previous reporting engine was built in-house. This created several challenges for the growing company, including:

• Outdated technology: Recruiting software developers who could generate modern, visually appealing reports with their existing tools was increasingly difficult.
• Customization and flexibility issues: The organization created customized reports for specific user groups, including campground operators, corporate leaders, and front desk staff. This process was complex and time-consuming.
• Limited self-serve capabilities: The previous system didn't let users interact with reports. This left the development team responsible for customizing reports for different users' needs.

Jef Sutherland, Report Developer, led the initiative to modernize the front-desk reporting engine, which was relied on almost daily to inform critical business decisions.

Solution

In response to these challenges, Jef's IT Director recommended Jaspersoft to revamp the reporting engine. Based on positive past experience, he was confident that Jaspersoft could easily handle KOA’s sophisticated needs.

The goal was to create a reporting experience that felt completely native to the organization's front desk software. To achieve this, KOA needed a robust system that could run on the backend. The system would make their in-house software feel like it was built from the ground up with robust reporting capabilities.

Several factors drove the decision to implement Jaspersoft, including ease of use, customer support excellence, and the platform's flexibility.

Jaspersoft Studio's intuitive design

Jaspersoft Studio's intuitive design tools let users quickly generate functional, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing reports. The platform's speed and ease of use helped Jef quickly migrate years of legacy reports without significant downtime or delays.

Jaspersoft Studio comes with powerful features and user-friendly tools that cater to both beginners and advanced users. By combining Jaspersoft Studio and Visualize.js, KOA could create interactive reports that let users sort, filter, and interact with data in real time—without additional development work.

"Before Jaspersoft, we had to render charts in HTML, which was time-consuming and had a learning curve," Jef shared. "But Jaspersoft Studio makes report creation much easier and quicker. Plus, Jaspersoft Studio helps us achieve maintainability as we recruit new developers. And lastly, modernization: Jaspersoft offers reporting and visualization updates, so I don't have to keep up with the latest tools on my own."

Long-term customer support

Jef worked with the same Jaspersoft customer support manager for multiple years. He notes how much he appreciates partnering with a company that can retain experienced and helpful support staff. The platform's support team showed commitment to understanding KOA's needs and provided tailored solutions for Jef's specific situation.

"Jaspersoft's support team really knows their product, and they're genuinely interested in trying to figure out how they can get me on track," said Jef. "I don't think people hear that very often about support experience."

Spreadsheet flexibility with enterprise-wide scalability

Campers call the franchise's locations millions of times each year. To improve these processes, a member of the KOA staff used a spreadsheet to create a helpful occupancy pick-up report. It displayed bookings and cancellations over the trailing two weeks, including a trendline for each row. This lets franchise owners and corporate leaders assess business performances with a better real-time view.

KOA's custom occupancy report had clear value, but it wasn't scalable across the entire organization, nor was it maintainable as a spreadsheet. The development team would need to create customized reports that met different teams' specific needs. This process was complex and time-consuming when using KOA's former in-house reporting engine.

Jaspersoft offers users the flexibility to produce functional, user-friendly reports with ease. Replicating the occupancy pick-up report in Jaspersoft gave it additional user interactivity based on the business's needs. This let KOA's development team release the report for widespread use by franchise owners, corporate leaders, and front desk staff.

"Due to the power and flexibility of Jaspersoft, I can quickly create almost any report in Jaspersoft to a T and make it even better based on business needs," Jef added. "I've never come across a user request where I've had to say Jaspersoft can't do that."

Results

Implementing Jaspersoft resulted in a more efficient and user-friendly reporting engine for KOA Campgrounds. It improved the operational and decision-making capabilities, including for franchise owners and corporate management.

Jef and his team have relied on Jaspersoft to modernize front-desk reporting at KOA for over seven years. This has resulted in several significant achievements:

• Increased efficiency: With Jaspersoft, KOA can generate reports faster than ever. The streamlined process saves time and lets the company respond more quickly to data requests from different user groups.
• Enhanced visuals and functionality: The modern, visually engaging reports generated through Jaspersoft Studio are a significant improvement from the previous system. The well-designed reports provide better functionality, making it easier to extract meaningful insights from data.
• Empowered users: The self-serve features powered by Visualize.js let KOA's users interact with reports in new ways. For example, users can now sort and filter reporting data without requesting customizations from the development team.
• Scalability and flexibility: The new reporting system can handle the growing data needs of KOA's expanding network. Jaspersoft's scalable architecture ensures the system can grow with the company, accommodating new users and reports as needed.

Jef looks forward to building upon the powerful reporting engine he and his team implemented. Using Jaspersoft, Jef sees ample opportunity to take dashboards and interactivity to the next level for all of KOA's users.