Application Development
Applications developed for an organisation are usually perceived as being expensive & time consuming to develop, difficult to distribute & train staff and usually result in ongoing maintenance.
This does not have to be the case.
eBMS utilises Excel and Visual Basic for Application (VBA) to provide quick cost effective and intuitive applications. eBMS does not want maintenance to be a significant part of its business model and so endeavors to design applications that require minimal, if any maintenance. That is to say, eBMS believes that a minimal maintenance strategy is in fact a competitive advantage. Deployment of excel based applications is very straightforward. Email the excel workbook or email a link to a central workbook.That’s about as simple and cost effective as it comes.
Some of the applications that eBMS have developed are:
- A multi-user sales forecasting system comprising of a ‘thin’ excel client communicating with a backend SQL server. This is a full bridging forecast used by over 100 sales people, around Australia, managing over 8,000 customers. The portable reporting layer includes variance reports, time series charts and waterfall/bridging charts.
- A System that allows multi-user control of various documents that help drive, monitor and analyse business improvement and change process.This system comprises an Excel client and an Access or SQL Server host. It maintains over 6000 documents via twelve different input forms. There are approximately ten different specialised reports both tabular and charting to help analyse and manage the processes.
- A pricing model that generates price lists, customer translated price lists, computer formatted upload files for 1000 customers and over 1500 products.
- A report that uploads over 40,000 records of the latest data from the central system and then presents that data in an intuitive way.
- Many different types of databases.
- A system that downloads data from different databases integrates the data and then provides an overall reporting solution.
- An application that takes systems data correlates it with measured data and then provides cost estimates of cutting activities.
- A load planning application that loads current orders and allows the user to point and click on a bar chart to forecast orders.
- An application that helps analysis of machine down time.The user enters data into an intelligent form, the data is then placed in a database. Various reports allow the user to time series or pareto the recorded data.
- An application that allows a business to forecast profitability and revenue based on a model with forecasts constrained by customer type and quantity discounts
eBMS has developed and deployed over one hundred different excel applications.
Process Automation
eBMS can make your organisation more efficient by automating repetitive activities.
Most organisations require some form of periodic reporting. Each period new data must be integrated within the prior periods reports. There are many activities, some time consuming, required in updating these reports.
Quite often man days per month of mundane, non value adding work is requested from executive staff and assistants.
Activities Associated with periodic reporting:
- Retrieve current periods data
- Format the data ready for data integration
- Move prior reports' data into earlier periods
- Integrate latest data
- Change Headings, Graphs, Tables, formulas etc
- Fix errors
- Publish and Save
- eBMS has created many different automated reports
By utilising the power of Visual Basic behind the Excel presentation interface, eBMS has been able to free up valuable resources by automating the activities mentioned above. This has the effect of allowing the author to add value to the QUALITY of the report rather than wasting time updating it. Therefore improving morale and allowing the staff member to add other value to the organisation.
Operations Performance
Most operations or processes are compiled of smaller activities. By drawing in the relevant data from an ERP or MRP system a smaller data set can be created. This enables easy access to the data and the ability to build a comprehensive report that can view the real state of the operation. Such a report can be used at any user level. Worrying trends can be rectified immediately.
Many of our customers have claimed that this form of reporting can more readily identify new improvement projects and key performance indicators.
This results in corrective actions and continuous business improvement.
Reports of this nature can cover manufacturing, waste analysis, operational performance and process performance.
Functional areas addressed by eBMS services & products.
For additional information relevant to your industry sector or functional requirement, please contact us
Enterprise Reporting
eBMS has
developed some very flexible and intuitive solutions and
applications that allow managers to understand the tens of thousands of transactions that often represent there
business. There are many parameters that help to provide good
reporting tool.
These are some of the important requirements that should be met by any enterprise reporting tool:
- The validity and representation of the data should be accepted across the organisation
- The visual interface should be stimulating - eBMS uses graphing to aid understanding
- The control interface should be intuitive - with a minimal training requirement
- it should prompt the need to ask questions about the trends.
- The question posed could be answered by drilling further into eBMS.
- It should be based on your systems data - the reporting data can be verified
- Re-populating the reports from the system should be automatic
- The solution should require minimal computer understanding
- The report should not require any maintenance - selectors should be populated from the data automatically
- Employment should be quick and cost effective
eBMS has developed reporting tools for many different requirements:
- Sales segmentation analysis - by region, warehouse, customer, time
- Company DIFOT (Delivered in full on time) Performance Analysis
- Slow moving stock
- Machine Performance Analysis - trending, down time, efficiency, volume weighted speed etc
- Waste Analysis
- Transaction Time process reporting
- Sales and Operations Forecasting reporting
- Discount Analysis reporting
Dyanamic Charting
eBMS describes dynamic charting as the ability to change the view of a chart by simply changing a selector or control in that chart. The objective is to provide a common user interface that provides many, sometimes thousands of ways of viewing the underlying data set. This is a very powerful and friendly way of reviewing and analysing complicated data sets.
Some examples that eBMS have developed are:
- A clickable bar chart. When a series is double clicked a dialog box opens with information allowing the user to perform an action.
- A histogram that includes an indication of standard deviations and acceptable tolerances.
- A Speedo that indicates the current value of a parameter within a selectable range. The Speedo is coloured to indicate degrees of status. A Pareto chart that changes depending on the time frame selected. An area chart that changes the sales data breakdown from regions to warehouse to sales channel at the simple push of a selection button
- A time series chart that allows you to view daily, weekly and monthly at the simple push of a selection button
- A bar chart that allows you to drill from state, to customer group to customer, to product group to product with the change of a drop down selector.
- A line chart that allows you to see actual levels and then percentage of the total at a push of a button.
- A chart that provides a combination of all the above.
Excel has a very powerful presentation layer supported by a very flexible graphing object. eBMS has provided many dynamic graphing solutions to many customers that could not achieve any where near the same standard with some of the most sophisticated (and very expensive) business reporting tools.
eBMS has genuinely had comments such as AWESOME, POWERFUL, INCREDIBLY INTUITIVE to describe its dynamic graphing solutions and applications.
