The staff of eBMS have an excellent understanding of Microsoft Excel. eBMS has successfully developed and deployed many Excel solutions ranging from simple spreadsheets to complicated process management systems utilising the support of Visual Basic for Applications.
We have always managed to exceed our customers' expectations.
Some of the projects that eBMS has completed are:
Business Improvements System:
- Allows multi-user input and reporting of various documents that help drive the improvement process
- Intelligent Client (Excel) to Host (Access/SQL Server) Model
- VBA used within the Excel user interface allowing a simple access to the host database
- The technical design makes the system very scalable
- Twelve different forms allow data update with each form utilising unique business logic
- Form inputs are a WYSIWYG interface allowing for minimal user training
- Provides many different reports in formats such as Excel and Word
- Includes a full graphical/charting analysis report using dynamic charting
- Designed to be simply migrated to a Web interface
Sales Segmentation Report:
- Allows graphical analysis of sales data cube in many dimensions
- Utilises area graph analysis
Inventory Analysis:
- Analyses slow moving stock by customer, warehouse and market segment
- Provides both tabular and graphical reports
- Has resulted in lowering stock levels by over 6 million dollars
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Re-Engineering of an interlinked 50 file spreadsheet:
- Solution is now one file manageable with minimal excel expertise
- Application has many time saving automation features
- It is now very scalable - over 1000 customers and 1500 products.
- Has many built in security features
- Automatic formatting saves countless man-hours of time and frustration
Operations Performance Report:
- Created a reporting application that uses data from a company database
- Allows dynamic graphical analysis of many performance parameters
- Allows users to select thousands of different slices/views of the data
- manages over 40 thousand lines of data
- provides real time view of 12day, 12week or 12 months of data
- Single push button automatic daily data update
Business Simulation Model:
- Created a business model representing the first three years of business
- Allows simple user control of pricing and discounts by customer, qty and market segment
- Based on a modular, relational database methodology
- Provides both tabular and graphical reports
- Includes Risk analysis utilising Monte Carlo techniques
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eBMS has completed many more successful projects.
eBMS has the business, operations and technical skill/experience to help your company either create new spreadsheets / applications or to re-design/engineer your current ones. Attention is paid to design goals, user requirements and budget allowance to achieve cost effective and innovative solutions. Quite often, it is necessary to support the design with Visual Basic for applications.
Is your company trying to support unmanageable spreadsheets?
Excel is an application that invites people to create reports. It can be simple to use and through linking of sheets a complicated relationship of information can be achieved. As the requirement grows, the inter-relationships become more complicated. The spreadsheets are normally built by people with limited Excel or structured programming knowledge who use only the basic functions of Excel. Not only that, spreadsheets that have grown over time, quite often inherit a structure that is no longer suitable for its' role. This may lead to the spreadsheet becoming difficult if not impossible to manage. The "Catch 22" here is that the people that developed the spreadsheet do not have the skills to restructure it and quite often do not even realise that many gains could be achieved by doing it a different way.
Excel Spreadsheet structure and design:
Without the correct skills, Excel reports can cost countless hours of productivity and limit the time available by the employee to focus on adding value by using their core competencies (what they were hired for).
In other words, your best salesperson could be spending less time with your customers, your managers may not be spending enough time adding value and your company may be fostering poor productivity.
Problems Associated with unsuitable spreadsheet design:
- People spend more time fixing the spreadsheet rather than adding value to the information.
- Adding extra functionality risks breaking the current design.
- Probability of internal errors caused by incorrect linkages increases
- The cost of maintenance becomes significant and probably hidden.
- The presentation may not be very user friendly
- Frustration of the people juggling the spreadsheet will most likely be high.
- The spreadsheet will most likely not easily scale.
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What is the correct structure?
Spreadsheet reports seem to continually grow in functionality and complexity. Quite often, spreadsheets become, over time, end user applications. Yet they are still seen as "just" spreadsheets. Would an end user application have different design parameters than a spreadsheet? Would the support of a spreadsheet defined as being an application be handled differently by your company? Would the budget allocated to an application be treated differently than a spreadsheet? Would a spreadsheet currently handling 10 customers require a different structure if it were to handle 100 customers?
The structure is dependent on:
- How it is currently used and who uses it?
- How much time is used to import data?
- What is the computer or excel skill level of the end users?
- Whether Visual Basic for Applications is needed?
- How quickly does it have to re-act to user input?
- How is the data populated?
- What are the parameters that need to scale over time?
- Is security becoming an issue?
- Internal politics
- Deployment considerations
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There are countless considerations that may influence the structure, and they will be dependent on the organisations environment.
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