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 OfficeWriter Home > Customers Home > officewriter-209.aspx |
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Reduced
Development Time; Faster Reports
$470,000 Reduction in Development Costs; Delivered 10X Faster Than Prior
Application
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. |
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| Situation: |
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| 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.
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| Solution: |
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Houston,
Texas
www.cmaiglobal.com |
Customer
Hardware and Software:
Server: Windows 2000 Server/IIS5.0
Database: SQL Server 2000
Client: Browser
(HTML3.2, JS1.2, CSS2)
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Business
Situation:
CMAI needed to replace their crucial reporting solution
that was producing reports too slowly, requiring
constant bug fixes and causing versioning differences
amongst end users. |
Solution:
CMAI turned to SoftArtisans for a high-performance,
stable solution that generates up-to-the-minute
reports to users worldwide. The switch to OfficeWriter
was simple for developers and seamless for employees
and clients. |
Benefits:
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Revenue
growth through increased report usage and
client retention |
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One-tenth
the development time was needed to produce
a significantly better solution |
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Reports
are generated 10 times faster than the previous
applicat |
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End
users make decisions based on an up-to-date,
centralized data source |
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 It
took us one-tenth of the time to produce a comprehensive
and flexible reporting solution with OfficeWriter... The
application is making our end users more productive because
it generates reports 10 times faster than our previous
solution. |
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Jim
Homminga
Director
Web Application Development
Chemical Market Associates, Inc.
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OfficeWriter
is absolutely awesome.
You guys make me look so good. |
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Jim
Homminga
Director
Web Application Development
Chemical Market Associates, Inc.
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| Benefits: |
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| 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.
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: |
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| 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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With
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 |
ISlow
solution with differing, outdated reports for users |
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