Wow, that was fun. I haven’t the chance to do that for a little while.
The other day I met and spent a couple of hours with a very nice fellow who’s been around the IT world for some time. Lately he’s been working with ASP, Access, Dot Net, SQL Server, that sort of thing. He was no stranger to various ERP applications and the endless and varying needs of users.
He’d been told stories of my reporting systems and was curious as to how I accomplished the work, especially the turnaround time.
I started the show and tell session with a run through of the end result: Excel reports that he hadn’t yet seen. I discussed with him the various inputs, the size and the number of pages in the source reports, and that was he was seeing was only one in a series of distribution reports.
Clearly he saw how this file would be an asset for managing the business. That’s when it got really interesting.
“How long does it take to produce and summarize all of this?” he asked, seemingly expecting an answer in a number of days.
“About ten to 15 minutes per file, once you’ve got your new weekly ERP reports ready to go”, I answered.
I wish I had a picture of his face for you.
Shock and Awe
“How do you go from text files to Excel data? That’s the key isn’t it?”
The poor man just wasn’t ready for what was coming.
Seeing that we had the available time, I launched into full demo mode. I ran through building extraction templates. I built both simple and more complex formula based calculated fields. We even made a custom function, and I built both internal and external lookup fields.
I showed him some ideas for user-edited fields, and runtime-parameter fields. We utilized address blocks, filters (simple and compound) and custom sorts. All the while, we talked about the technical specs, any current limitations, and the array of file types that can be used for inputs and outputs.
We concluded the full Monarch demo by whipping up a handful of summaries to show the difference between a static text file and the versatile, analysis-ready results that are generated with just a few minutes of work in Monarch. I pointed out that our efforts – though they took very little time to generate anyway – need never be duplicated as the model can be reused as a processing machine thousands of times, by simply applying the saved model to new data.
“How quickly can you write SQL queries for all of those ad-hoc data requests you get?” I asked, as this topic came up during the demo.
“Fairly quickly, but not that quickly, and nowhere near that easily”, was his response, sounding a tad disappointed while slowly shaking his head.
I closed with a brief line by line examination of one of my Monarch automation processing routines, done with VBA.
“So you’re saying that for repetitive data tasks you never do the work manually? Your program just applies the models and those project things to the new weekly reports? What do you need to do to complete the process?” he inquired.
“Right. Once the models, projects and a little programming is done, this system is utterly hands-free. What I do to finish it off? I go make myself a coffee. The VBA program even combines the related data and formats my final distribution reports.
Enter a New Phase with Monarch
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen someone so eager to stand up that very instant, return to his office and begin to excel with Monarch.
