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Situation
At Yakima, the Fit Team is charged with assuring there
is a Yakima rack product that fits every make and model
of vehicle. In order to accomplish this, the team must
access a mass of data about vehicles and about their
own products. The team originally input all of their
data into Excel manually, which was very time consuming.
In an attempt to make the Fit Team's reporting more efficient
and manageable, Yakima's Web Development team tried to
create a solution in Web format, but viewing the data
in HTML did not meet the reporting needs of the Fit Team.
The team needed to manipulate the data to make it useful,
so they were forced to cut and paste the data from the
HTML format into Excel, which is a very messy and time
consuming process, during which formatting is lost. Yakima
needed a better way to provide a link between the data
on their server and a familiar and flexible presentation
format for the end-user.
Solution
Yakima looked at several possible solutions to solve
their reporting problem. One option was a large reporting
product, which was very expensive and provided many extraneous
features that Yakima would never use. Then the development
team tried to make use of macros to pull the data into
Excel, but due to the complicated masses of data, macros
were not the best solution. After a comprehensive evaluation
period, Yakima purchased SoftArtisans OfficeWriter. The
development team was impressed with the online documentation,
ease of application development and the personal support
that backs every SoftArtisans product. They found that
it was easy to integrate their existing database with
OfficeWriter in order to produce the flexible Excel output
that their end-users were accustomed to working with.
The Fit Team users appreciated the one-click to fully
formatted, easily customized, native Excel spreadsheets.
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Customer:
Arcata, CA
www.yakima.com
Customer Configuration:
Server: Windows 2000
Database: SQL Server 2000
Client: Excel 97, 2000, XP
IE and Netscape
Business Situation:
Yakima's Fit Team needed a cost-effective, efficient
Web reporting system that would allow them to
quickly access, modify and share reports in the
familiar Microsoft Excel format.
Solution:
Yakima used SoftArtisans OfficeWriter to build
a dynamic reporting system for their Intranet.
Their new reporting solution enabled the Fit
Team to have a self-service reporting application
without having Microsoft Excel or space-intensive
files on the server.
Benefits:
Saved weeks of in-house development
time
High user satisfaction due to familiar,
flexible, easy to use Microsoft Excel format
Reporting system is self-service
and is available to users 24 hours a day
High performance and scalable system
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