A niche pharmaceutical company located in New Jersey hadn't thought too much about basic reports, let alone business intelligence, when its sales rocketed to $100 million after just three years in existence. At that point, finance decided to stop using Quickbooks and migrate its general ledger and invoicing to an SAP module in its parent company.
I was consulting for the company, and around the same time, its IT group found a Danish-designed system called Navision and decided to apply it to the enterprise. Of course, this was no trivial task and took the better part of two more years to implement. The trouble was, no one had time to think about back-end reports while all of this was going on.
In the meantime, hundreds of Excel spreadsheets resided on hard drives or at selected email addresses. The national sales manager had 26 separate monthly Excel outputs. Operations trumped that easily, with 80 spreadsheets showing monthly parts usage. Customer...
I was consulting for the company, and around the same time, its IT group found a Danish-designed system called Navision and decided to apply it to the enterprise. Of course, this was no trivial task and took the better part of two more years to implement. The trouble was, no one had time to think about back-end reports while all of this was going on.
In the meantime, hundreds of Excel spreadsheets resided on hard drives or at selected email addresses. The national sales manager had 26 separate monthly Excel outputs. Operations trumped that easily, with 80 spreadsheets showing monthly parts usage. Customer...
