Johannesburg, 15 Oct 2010
Excel geeks have now had enough time to evaluate Excel 2010 and reach conclusions on its positioning in self-service BI (SSBI).
Brad Bartlett, MD of Excel Integration, says: “We've evaluated and believe that in its space, Alchemex together with MS Excel still offers the best fit for South African SSBI. Alchemex contributes to the daily working lives of over 20 000 financial and IT managers and has been offering self-service BI for around eight years.
Bartlett suggests two main attributes continue to maintain Alchemex's status as a leading Excel Integration application.
Firstly, the product has always shipped with a comprehensive set of templates for popular accounting packages. “For instance, our vault has over 400 reports developed for Pastel, ACCPAC, SYSPRO, SAPB1 and Buildsmart”, says Bartlett. This starting point fast tracks the creation of customised Excel reporting and can be achieved by Excel super users, releasing IT resources.
Secondly, the architecture of Alchemex containers has emerged as the 'master stroke'. The Administrator module is used to first create containers. Each container houses all the fields available to the Excel report writer and a single container can act as the data hub for hundreds of reports. Bartlett explains: “Containers allow IT to maintain the integrity of the data as it makes its way into Excel, combating traditional problems of rogue Excel.” In addition, all the formulas usually repeated over and over in Excel documents can be developed once, in the container, and used to service many reports.
“Most skilled Excel end-users are not data experts and need help with the back end of their data”, claims Bartlett. The Alchemex architecture creates a natural role both for the IT expert and the end-user. “IT prepares containers and skilled users can create any views they seek,” says Bartlett.
Returning to MS Excel 2010, Bartlett suggests that due to the pervasive existence of Alchemex containers, Excel's new functionality (such as PowerPivot and Slicers) can feed off data that is already organised and optimised for Excel reporting. Bartlett concludes: “So much Alchemex data preparation has been done on so many applications already, and this means we can derive immediate benefits from Microsoft's new SSBI offering.”
As a global Alchemex distributor, Excel Integration develops Excel solutions for popular software vendors. Excel Integration's channel of MiWiz partners, together with Exceltraining.co.za, completes the cycle in the delivery of self-service business intelligence.
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