How PowerSouth modernized reporting and significantly reduced infrastructure costs

The Challenge

Finding a safe path off an end-of-life reporting platform

PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, headquartered in Andalusia, Ala., is a generation and transmission (G&T) electric cooperative with 18 electric cooperatives and four municipal electric systems in Alabama and northwest Florida.

Heath Mills, PowerSouth's Business Application Supervisor, manages a team of eight developers responsible for approximately 52 reporting application systems. Those systems support many of PowerSouth's core business, financial, and reporting processes, including accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing, inventory, and budgeting.

Over the years, PowerSouth built up hundreds of reports on Oracle Reports. Employees rely on these reports as a primary way to view and use business data. For example, finance uses the reports to print vouchers, accounts receivable uses reports to generate invoices, and purchasing uses reports for purchase orders and quote requests. Multiple departments also use reports to review detailed budget information. 

The challenge arose when Oracle ended support for its reporting solution. 

With so many reports tied so closely to day-to-day operations, PowerSouth couldn't simply turn the system off. It also couldn't redesign every process around a completely new reporting model within a reasonable timeline. 

“We were on an end-of-life product, so we didn’t have the luxury of time. We needed to get the company to a safe place where we could continue to sustain operations.”
— Heath Mills, Business Application Supervisor, PowerSouth

PowerSouth's first solution was to move some reporting processes to another platform from its previous reporting vendor. However, this program required developers to work with Microsoft Word, plugins, tables, nested tables, and Rich Text Format files to build complex reports and create the outputs they needed. After about a year, Mills and the Business Application team concluded this wasn't the right fit.

PowerSouth needed another option. Rather than transforming its reporting processes overnight, the goal was to move away from the unsupported reporting solution while keeping its existing workflows operational. 

This called for a platform that could:

• Function alongside the previous reporting platform (to ease migration)
• Support complex paginated reports
• Fit the skills of PowerSouth's current development team
• Produce the pixel-perfect PDF outputs that employees already depended on

The Solution

Choosing a reporting platform that could support the business today while creating a path forward

Partnering with an implementation services firm, PowerSouth evaluated possible replacements for its previous reporting platform. Jaspersoft stood out for supporting the type of reporting that PowerSouth already relied on. The development team wouldn't need to learn a completely different way of working.

PowerSouth began migrating its workflows to Jaspersoft in 2024, with as many as 600 reports moved so far. An increasing number of PowerSouth's financial and business systems now use Jaspersoft to create pixel-perfect, paginated reports. 

“Jaspersoft has become one of the primary ways our teams view business data, mainly through the PDF reports they generate.”

PowerSouth employees still work through the same core processes by entering information — such as purchase orders, check requests, and budgets — into the company's existing applications. Jaspersoft then pulls that data from the database and presents it in the structured PDF reports that employees need.

The company also uses Jaspersoft for new reporting requirements. Requests can come from almost anywhere in the company, from individual users to managers and executives. The development team reviews each request to determine whether to modify an existing report or build a new one.

Building complex reports without fighting the layout tool

A key reason why Jaspersoft is a good fit for PowerSouth is its ability to handle complex report layouts. Many of PowerSouth's reports do much more than display simple tables. They require multiple levels of grouping, master-detail relationships, summaries within summaries, and totals across different parts of the business.

Beyond that, some users have specific needs for how information is displayed. They may want data grouped by one level, summarized at another, and then rolled up again at a higher level. 

With other tools, building complex reports can require more work to structure the layout and control how the final output looks. Jaspersoft gives PowerSouth's developers a more direct way to create frames, organize report sections, and control final outputs. 

“The value of Jaspersoft is that it makes it easy for us to build complex, pixel-perfect reports and present the data in the exact way our users need.”

For example, PowerSouth's purchase order retainage report tracks money being withheld during the purchasing process. It connects information from various areas, including purchase orders, accounting, contracts, and work orders. 

But the final report doesn't just need to contain all this data. The report must also be organized in a way that matches how the business user wants to review it. Jaspersoft provides an easy-to-use presentation layer, once developers build the right data model. 

The solution makes it possible to organize the output across different groups and levels to give users reports that reflect their actual workflows. The development team can meet detailed business requirements without changing how employees receive information. 

Simplifying report development

PowerSouth's development team already has a heavy workload, so it was vital that Jaspersoft supported building high-quality reports easily and efficiently. According to Mills, the development team manages a substantial backlog of enhancement requests while continuing to support critical operational systems. Reducing unnecessary reporting complexity helps the team spend more time meeting business needs and less time wrestling with the reporting tool.

“Jaspersoft is much more efficient, easier to use, and far simpler than other solutions we have used.”

Reducing the infrastructure needed to support reporting

Another important consideration was the infrastructure required to run the reporting platform. PowerSouth’s previous reporting solution was a much heavier environment, as the company’s complex development, test, and production setup relied on six databases and multiple servers.

Jaspersoft's simpler footprint has fewer systems for PowerSouth's infrastructure teams to patch, update, maintain, and support. Reducing that burden makes the reporting environment easier to sustain over time, especially for a company already running dozens of custom applications. 

“Jaspersoft costs much less to maintain than our previous reporting solution. There’s less infrastructure, less hardware, and less ongoing work required to keep it running.”

Getting support when problems come up

Jaspersoft's client support was another highlight for PowerSouth. Strong, reliable support is crucial during large migrations when development teams are already balancing ongoing operations and new projects with moving hundreds of reports. 

Mills shared a story involving an issue exporting from Excel. Even though the problem ended up being related to PowerSouth's environment, Mills' Jaspersoft contact helped the team work through it. 

“When we run into a problem, the Jaspersoft team is there to help us resolve it. That level of support has been extremely valuable during our migration effort.”

The Results

Moving reporting to safer ground without forcing the business to change overnight

Though PowerSouth's migration is still underway, Jaspersoft has already given the company a practical way to move operations off of an end-of-life reporting product. With 600 reports migrated so far, the company continues to work through its remaining active report library. 

Critically, PowerSouth made this change without rebuilding every business process that depends on reports. Employees continue using the detailed PDFs they rely on for finance, purchasing, budgeting, invoicing, and other workflows. Additionally, Mills says that Jaspersoft is yielding much higher cost savings than its previous reporting and analytics platform, particularly on the infrastructure side.

PowerSouth now has:

• A reporting platform that fits its developers' existing skills
• A practical way to build complex, pixel-perfect reports
• A simpler environment to maintain
• A platform that works with its existing forms applications

Looking forward, PowerSouth aims to modernize how it uses data and shift further into analytics. With Jaspersoft, PowerSouth is achieving this without having to change everything at once. 

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