Faster reporting for frustrated spreadsheet users. That was the message on the wall of our booth at Sage Summit in Atlanta this week. People would stop, stare and then tell us just exactly how frustrated they were. One woman proudly waved her arm in the air, practically jumping up and down and hollering, “That’s me! That’s me!”

The story was the same, time and again, regardless of location, job function or technology involved: people everywhere are wasting hours, days, weeks and even months cutting and pasting information from their applications into spreadsheets in order to analyze their businesses. Why are they doing this? Because they don’t have any other solution that is easy to use and cost effective to implement.

• The woman waving her arm in the air runs Sales Operations. Their accounting system is not integrated to their text-file-spouting, antiquated MRP system and their forecasting application is home-grown. The result is that they manually move data around into Access databases and worst of all, cut and paste into a 64MB spreadsheet that cannot be shared with the people who need it because of its size. She has already calculated the time spent on manually mashing this data is over 50 person-days per year!
• Manufacturer of RV’s who sells through a dealer network.  They have over 10 years of sales transactions by dealers and VIN number stored in Excel files and a separate application that tracks warranty information.  They recently implemented MAS so now they need to create reports from 3 separate systems and want to give their dealers access to reports.
• One IT Manager receives a daily stream of EDI information from distributors about sales. This information is processed as CSV and then imported into custom tables in their accounting system. On top of this, he has written over 120 Crystal Reports files that are scheduled and emailed to support requests for information from their 50+ sales reps in the field. The reps are compensated both on their sales and sales from the distributors. He cannot get enough reports built fast enough to satisfy their requirements, as the information requests change almost daily.
• A women from a Legal aid society said they receive hundreds of invoices every day from legal aid lawyers.  To figure out how to best spend a limited legal aid budget, she and her boss are spending hours each week
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