Excel Services
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.
Excel Spreadsheet Re-engineering
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.
Excel Training
Fantastic new training opportunity!
Have you ever wondered how much time is spent on Excel workbooks? Many people across all levels of business accumulate years of experience developing a reasonable skill level that just covers the basics.
We receive feedback from customers asking for additional Excel training that relates directly to their work.
We are inviting any interested participants to contact us to formalize specific training requirements that can make a real difference in their day to day workload.
The objectives of the program:
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To provide advanced level training that goes beyond the basics.
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Learn tips & tricks that will help save countless hours.
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Use these skills to create more robust and scalable spreadsheets.
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Identify cues for knowing what to do if you get stuck.
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More powerful presentation & overall performance.
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The training is designed to deliver intensive small group training for all levels of corporate enterprise and management
Learn what the text books don't tell you!
To find out more information regarding our excel training or services please
email 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.