Today I’m thrilled to welcome a very special guest to Excel with Monarch site.
Grant Perkins of Grant Perkins Consulting based near Derby, England has been an independent consultant for 12 years, assisting clients around the UK and Europe with their computing solutions, and specializes in Monarch and Datapump installations. Grant has a 25 year background in Service Management systems specialty within a general business computing application consultancy career. Grant can be contacted via the Excel with Monarch web site.
I asked Grant if he would be so kind as to share with us a story about how Monarch positively impacted either one of his past employers or a client.
With further ado, here’s Grant:
Hitting the server
Some years ago I worked for a software developer in the niche market of Service Management. They developed a system with several modules that, in total, boasted around 5,000 reports or variants of reports that could be run in different ways and with different chosen output content. More than 5,000 if you included all of the sort and selection options.
Still, the clients wanted more. This seems to have parallels even today for many large enterprise level systems. It’s amazing how many times none of the 5,000 standard reports suit the end users.
Then the whole situation got worse.
Every manager wanted his or her own report; the same report but with his or her data only. So the system would run through the night producing reports, often trawling through the same data several times. Specifying the hardware was a nightmare and an ever moving target. Making time for backups was a technical challenge, as was printing the output, which of course was rarely read. Would you work through 1,000 pages of fanfold each day?
Later I discovered Monarch, around the time of Version 3 as I recall. It was also about the time that Excel became the de facto standard for spreadsheets.
I quickly realised that for the key modules of the service management system I could use just two reports to give me 98% of all the management reporting daily needs and simply re-present that information, suitably filtered by department and manager, through a simple Monarch process. Better yet, the output, whether a new report or more likely an Excel document, was of far greater use to the recipient.
Best of all, the server load was reduced and the process could be easily automated and simply maintained.
Today an even more powerful Monarch and Excel combination offers wider scope than ever. So why do people keep buying large and complex BI tools and the necessary supporting hardware rather than utilise the tested and proven outputs they have already paid for?
If anyone has a definitive answer I would love to hear it. Meanwhile, I have a challenge for you.
Can you find a single or maybe a small number of standard reports from your systems that give you all the information your people need? If so, how long would it take you to develop models that provide almost all of the reporting needs from those few reports?
Would your management be interested in such ideas?
I’d love to know.
Maximize Existing Systems
Thank you very much Grant. I’d guess that Grant’s story isn’t unique. Have you seen similar things happen? Tell us about it!
All over the world business people are looking for better ways to generate the information they need, often investing significantly in new systems because they just can’t see how to make the most of what they already have. About two years ago, Kevin Quinn published a great article that I’ve always remembered, entitled “Analysis is Overrated!”, in which he discussed the importance of reports over analysis work. I’d take his viewpoint a step further, and argue that there’s real value in all of those reports that took all that time and effort to develop some time ago, and before you abandon it all, find ways to extract and combine the information with Monarch to give you results you need today.
Before venturing into expensive new software and new hardware, it would be prudent to excel with Monarch.
