Alchemex has announced its arrival as a viable reporting application for SYSPRO, with its successful implementation at Optiplan. Although Alchemex is a generic reporting solution, it has been used to create a wealth of SYSPRO templates aimed at fast-tracking the reporting process at end-user level.
Alchemex has been successfully servicing Pastel users for three years, so significant new intellectual property was achieved by converting template solutions for Pastel users into formats useful for SYSPRO users.
As a leading supplier of intelligent filing solutions, Optiplan runs a countrywide operation with branches in five provinces. The accounting system, SYSPRO, is centralised at head office with branches participating over a WAN. The reporting demands internally and at branch level have traditionally placed a heavy burden on the financial department. Optiplan`s reason to implement Alchemex, an Excel-based reporting solution, was to introduce automation to an already extensive set of Excel reports.
The two main priorities at the outset were to save time on the daily preparation of the Order Intake Report as well as the monthly killer - the management pack. Optiplan had already made a sizeable investment in generating sophisticated Excel reporting using the ODBC connection to the SYSPRO database.
"We had already selected Excel as our preferred output for financial reporting but required a solution to overcome the manual intervention required and maintenance demands of using ODBC technology to access the data," explains Financial Director, Richard Currin.
The concept of Alchemex is to leverage the investment companies have already made in Excel. The abundant levels of Excel skill in most organisations render Excel a viable candidate as a reporting application. Traditional reporting software requires specialist skills, creating a barrier at end-user level. End-users, especially in the financial department, tend to help themselves in Excel because of output constraints from the report writing department and because the format they prefer is in Excel.
Alchemex provides a user-friendly integration to the back-end database and facilitates the automation of existing or new Excel reports. "The main purpose of our system is to provide opportunities to save significant blocks of time by reusing the Excel template when the report is required next time," says Alchemex CEO, Brad Bartlett. "Alchemex transforms Excel into the most practical reporting solution on the planet and companies already have their report writers, skilled in Excel," claims Bartlett.
The management pack usually provides the first opportunity to illustrate the effectiveness of this software to meet its promise. The Alchemex template is intended to beat typical frustrations such as maintaining the Excel workbook when new general ledger codes are added. All the schedules in the pack feed from one lookup sheet, which synchronises with the SYSPRO general ledger. The drill down feature allows a user to double-click on a balance and access the general ledger detail in one workbook.
Currin says: "This feature has huge potential because our department is inundated with management queries from the branches and now they can largely help themselves. Although management do have access to SYSPRO for queries there seems to be a resistance to learning new software, and they already know Excel."
In Optiplan`s case the daily Sales Intake Report was eating 30 minutes a day of Currin`s time and was therefore selected as the first Alchemex test. The aim of writing this bespoke report was to reduce the manual input required, from Currin, to provide sales staff with regular updates of their progress through the month. The report also improves the process of making adjustments to reflect the correct sales person`s figures.
"Reflecting a sales person`s daily performance sometime requires adjustments and we can easily make these on the Excel workbook," explains Currin. "This process now takes me an average of five minutes."
Alchemex provides any company with a new set of rules in the journey to access regular business intelligent reports. Firstly, the initial upfront cost is no longer prohibitive. Secondly, the company can empower its own staff to contribute to the published set of reports.
Currin explains: "We were looking for a system that we could roll-out in-house, at our own pace and without the need to rely on contracted resources."
Many companies, on the other hand, prefer the route of deploying Alchemex certified report writers to get the job done but the point is clear, a wider variety of choices are now available.
Because Alchemex is so cost-effective and also requires limited user training, companies that would not even have investigated the benefits of business intelligence software can now take a look.
"The returns we have already witnessed from Alchemex justify a new ongoing initiative to provide staff with access to information at their fingertips," says Optiplan`s Managing Director, Graham Hamilton. "Because it is generic software, we can also consider its impact on our other databases such as our CRM system," he continues.
In addition to SYSPRO, Alchemex also delivers end-user solutions for ACCPAC and Pastel. It is early days in the SYSPRO market, but if the track record in solving frustrations of financial managers using Pastel is any meaningful gauge, then expect to hear a lot more of Alchemex for SYSPRO users.
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