Reduced Development Time;
Faster Reports
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$470,000 Reduction in Development Costs; Delivered
10X Faster Than Prior Application
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Customer Profile
Founded in 1979 and with offices in Houston, London,
Hong Kong and Singapore, Chemical Market Associates,
Inc. (CMAI) provides consulting services worldwide for
the petrochemical industry. Companies look to CMAI to
provide concise information to ensure profitability,
effective business planning and an economically healthy
supply/demand relationship.
Situation
CMAI requires a high-performance, stable reporting solution
to provide its worldwide clients with a library of reports
including price analysis and forecasting, production
capacities and costs as well as materials and supply
for key chemical product groups.
CMAI's previous report generator, which took two developers
five years to create, was comprised of hard-coded report
definitions in an Access/Visual Basic client server application.
After five years of development it still had major areas
with bugs because of so many reporting options and data
cuts. Prone to error and interruption, the code was not
consistent and the latest deployed version was not resent
to everyone due to logistics and the narrow scope of
report changes.
In addition, report generation was slow, taking as long
as two minutes to produce a report. CMAI found that sometimes
the distributed data was not as current as internal databases
and different parties, such as consultants, partners
and outside clients, were not viewing the same information.
Solution
CMAI turned to SoftArtisans OfficeWriter because the
entire application could be run on the Web (no client-side
installs) and OfficeWriter's full support of Excel features
allowed end-users to create richly formatted templates.
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In addition, the development process was streamlined by producing
a single point of maintenance. Development time was reduced
because the OfficeWriter for Excel object model was very easy
to understand, conducive to learning and worked exactly how
it was described in the documentation.
The developers found that the OfficeWriter Style, Worksheet
and Range objects allowed for some very elegant coding techniques
and formatting. In many cases, files that had 1,000 rows /
20columns were still only 90kb.
And since the server side processing prepared all the textual
elements and main data bodies, the application was ready to
serve results to a rich client as well as a thin client.
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QUICK AND EASY ACCESS. CMAI developed this comprehensive
Web interface, providing users with countless ways
to view the production of various chemical products
throughout the world. With OfficeWriter, users had
the flexibility to generate up-to-the-minute reports
that showed specific chemical production by company,
geography, year, units, etc.
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From an application maintenance standpoint, developers now
only had to worry about three consistent points - the Excel
templates, the middle tier coding/logic and the database connection
- to maintain an incredibly scalable application.
Since the rollout of the OfficeWriter solution, CMAI has had
several new major report enhancements and says OfficeWriter
is used in well over 50 percent of all of CMAI reporting -
a significant figure considering that report generation and
analysis is their business.
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FAST AND FAMILIAR OUTPUT. OfficeWriter for Excel
produces a thorough and easy-to-analyze Excel spreadsheet
in as little as three seconds, giving CMAI's end users
immediate information to make business-critical decisions.
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Benefits
Compared to their original solution which took five
years to develop, it took CMAI developers one-tenth of
the time to produce a more comprehensive and flexible
reporting solution with OfficeWriter.
Their end users also became more productive because
OfficeWriter for Excel delivered reports 10 times faster
than the previous solution. OfficeWriter produced any
size Excel reports in as little as three seconds and
never longer than 15 seconds. CMAI soon found their "knowledge
users" had a new attitude towards using the reporting
tool. They actually looked forward to seeing their most
complex request manifest itself into a report choice
in the main application and were pleased to have it immediately
useable by all.
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Any changes were instantly reflected in the next global
user to run the report. Because OfficeWriter is a server-side
product, CMAI no longer had to ship a desktop version
of the application so the underlying application was
always current, giving users one consistent view of the
business-critical information.
Due to its ease-of-use and high performance, OfficeWriter
increased the user load to 70 percent of their clients.
Only three percent of their users even bothered to utilize
the old reporting solution.
CMAI revenues also increased with improved customer
retention created by the new Web application. No one
wanted to do without the application once they got their
user name and password. And due to OfficeWriter, CMAI
has predicted even higher retention/satisfaction from
their clients as they use the application daily in ever
increasing ways.
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Return on Investment
By switching to OfficeWriter for Excel as their reporting
solution, CMAI was able to deliver a new and highly improved
reporting system to their clients years ahead of schedule at
a cost savings of over $470,000.
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OfficeWriter |
Without OfficeWriter |
Time to Complete*
(*Business Days) |
120 days |
1,300 days |
Development Cost**
(**Based on Industry Avg. Salary) |
$48,000 |
$520,000 |
| Resulting Application |
High-performance solution with up-to-the
minute reports |
Slow solution with differing, outdated
reports for users |
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