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 manually importing then sorting, subtotalling and pivoting through the invoice data in Excel.

The most common request was for simple sales reporting.

• One senior project manager needs to get sales report to 70 in-house and field sales reps.  They have Business Objects internally and he said it was “overkill”  in terms of complexity and price for simple sales reporting.
• The controller of a medical clinic needs to analyze expenses which are coded by doctor, procedure and about 10 other categories.  Today she has to export the data to excel each month to understand expense trends and identify controls.
• CFO of a plastics company needs to provide sales reports for the company owner and the sales team composed of external manufacturers reps.  Today his only option is to e-mail excel reports which is time consuming because each rep needs a separate report.

The frustration is universal and has nothing to do with how Sage (or any other company) writes software, integrates their applications or add reports to their solutions.

• Companies will always have unique reporting requirements.
• Companies will always purchase and use applications that are not integrated with one another.
• Companies will always create custom solutions to satisfy their needs.
• Companies will always crunch data in spreadsheet, creating a whole host of issues

Indicee allows people and companies to make sense of all of this related but orphaned information. It was a great week. A terrific opportunity to get in front of a large number of people who all had similar stories to tell and to be able to deliver a product that switches on the light at the end of a long tunnel filling with countless hours of mouse-clicking.

Related posts:

1. Reflecting upon Sage Insights 2010
2. Indicee and Excel
3. Software Implementation by the Book